What Churchill Read before 1940

• In Event: Churchill at 150: 1874-2024

Abstract

Churchill wrote with warmth and humor about his early education—and its limits. Certain passages had a touch of the tremulous, given the discipline to which he was subjected by one or two nasty schoolmasters. Biographers have shown interest in the relevant pages of My Early Life (1930), his winning autobiography. But not there, nor anywhere else, is there a published accounting of all the books the young man read. It is natural to be intrigued: what printed works helped prepare Churchill for all the ministerial posts he held before age 40, without ever attending college, let alone graduate school? What elements of education played into developing that sparkling personality and precocious worldly view? What was the intellectual evolution of this writer destined for a Nobel Prize in Literature?

Author

• Christopher C. Harmon, Institute of World Politics