Churchill oftentimes ruminated on his estranged relationship with his father whom he terribly wished he could please as well as his clear love and admiration for his mother, described as a star, beautiful, bright but very distant. And Churchill takes pains to emphasize the difference between him and the Oxbridge crowd (Churchill having gone to Sandhurst).

By the end of his own twenty-fifth year, Churchill had been one of the world’s highest paid war correspondents, published his first five books, made his first lecture tour of North America, braved and breasted both battlefields and the hustings, and been elected to Parliament, where he would take his first seat only weeks after the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. I understood definitely that he had blown up all sorts of things and was therefore a very great man. The section on his time as a prisoner of war of the Boers and his subsequent escape were the highlight of the book for me.

It seems to me a reasonable time of life for someone to tell their story (assuming of course, they have something interesting to say).

The man was a student of humanity or at least Britain in his time with few parallels and fun to be a part of that! Nonetheless, the factual experiences of Churchill’s early life compete with any fiction, and any liberties taken are forgivable, in keeping with the wit, pace, and engaging style that characterizes the book. Personligt synes jeg at de mere personlige beretninger om Winston Churchill i ”Mine unge år” er de mest interessante passager. My lasting image of him was the jowly, squat, late-middle-aged man in the famous photo of him, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta. Winstons barnepige fru Everest gjorde et stort indtryk på den senere premierminister og var mere den unge Winstons nøgleperson end moderen var.Much of Churchill’s youth was taken up by his experience in conflict zones and therefore it might be easy to believe this memoir would be one filled with boasting and arrogance about the author’s own important. Churchill documents his childhood as the neglected son of the American Jenny Jerome and Lord Randolph Churchill—both of them monumentally self-centered and unnurturing: she was focused on society and on her numerous affairs with highly ranked men; he on a career in politics (as a Tory he was an MP and, briefly, Chancellor of the Exchequer) which he trashed by refusing to follow his Tory party’s line (once, when Winston was reported to have been badly hurt playing Follow the Leader, a Lord remarked “That will never be his father’s fate”).