Winston Churchill is renowned as an archetypal Great Briton (statesman, war leader, speechmaker and political maverick), with all the good and bad associations of such a description. He was also a prolific, occasionally inspired, writer who was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1953. That honour was principally to do with his fight against Hitler and the Nazis, and the citation saluted both his mastery of historical and biographical description, and his brilliant defence of “exalted human values”. But the award was not misplaced. Churchill was one of the finest prose stylists of the last century, steeped in the works of Shakespeare, Gibbon and Macaulay. My Early Life, a precocious autobiography, is his masterpiece.

As usual with Churchill, it’s a zesty cocktail of mixed ingredients, including rehashed newspaper articles, scraps of speechmaking, and many hours of dictated material. The bulk of the book was compiled during the parliamentary holidays in the summer of 1928. The happy author told Stanley Baldwin, “I have had a delightful month – building a cottage and dictating a book: 200 bricks and 2,000 words per day.”

His love of action and excitement were satisfied by two contrasting British institutions, Sandhurst and Fleet Street

Churchill’s delight in his own vivid experience is part of the book’s enduring appeal. His first 25 years, indeed, were like pages torn from a Boy’s Own adventure: colonial military service, skirmishes on the North-West Frontier, gruelling night marches, a great cavalry charge, and a daring escape from a Boer war prison. In his coming of age, Churchill’s love of action and excitement were fully satisfied by two contrasting British institutions, Sandhurst and Fleet Street. Nothing gave him more satisfaction than the jeopardy of warfare or journalism, and he excelled at both.

My Early Life, however, is more than just a ripping yarn. It is also a surprisingly direct and reflective, even intimate, self-portrait of an extraordinary character during his formative years, full of ironic wit and self-deprecating good humour. Churchill is also candid about his peculiar upbringing as the child of an Anglo-American marriage, his adored but distant mother (Jeanette Jerome), his doomed father (Lord Randolph Churchill), and his own miserable schooling at Harrow. In a famous passage, he confesses his enduring love for Mrs Everest, his nanny. On her death, he wrote: “She had been my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the 20 years I had lived.”

Elsewhere, he regrets his privileges as a junior member of the Marlborough family, and mourns the failure of his relationship with his father, Lord Randolph: “I would far rather have been apprenticed to a bricklayer’s mate, or run errands as a messenger boy, or helped my father to dress the front windows of a grocer’s shop. It would have been real… Also I should have got to know my father, which would have been a joy to me.”

As well as elegiac and filial, Churchill is also funny. His account of learning the Latin noun mensa is a classic:

“But why ‘O table?’” I persisted in genuine curiosity.

“You would use it in speaking to a table.”

“But I never do,” I blurted out in honest amazement.

“If you are impertinent, you will be punished very severely.”

Such was my introduction to the classics, from which, I have been told, many of our cleverest men have derived so much solace and profit.

In addition to his own life story, he is concerned to paint “a picture of a vanished age”, the fin-de-siècle world that would morph into Edwardian England. Additionally, as a man of action, Churchill knows how to tell a story, and make it live. My Early Life has countless minor pleasures, and two great set-piece narratives, the Battle of Omdurman (1898) and, in another theatre of imperial conflict, Churchill’s capture by the Boers (The Armoured Train) in 1899.

The general commanding British forces in Egypt, Sir Herbert Kitchener, did not favour young Winston, and did all he could to prevent him joining his forces. In retrospect, however, the grumpy general secured a slice of immortality from his pushy subordinate’s account of the last pitched battle in living memory:

Winston Churchill as a reporter for the Morning Post during the Boer war. Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock

It was not like the Great War. Nobody expected to be killed. Here and there in every regiment or battalion, half a dozen, a score, at the worst 30 or 40, would pay the forfeit; but to the great mass of those who took part in the little wars of Britain in those vanished light-hearted days, this was only a sporting element in a splendid game.

In numerous quotable passages from A Difficulty with Kitchener, to The Eve of Omdurman to The Sensations of a Cavalry Charge, a tour de force, Churchill excelled at extracting maximum literary value from his experience:

But now from the direction of the enemy there came a succession of grisly apparitions: horses spouting blood, struggling on three legs, men staggering on foot, men bleeding from terrible wounds, fish-hook spears stuck right through them, arms and faces cut to pieces, bowels protruding, men gasping, crying, collapsing, expiring.

Again, the young hero’s account of his charmed life in the frontline is never vainglorious. When he asked a fellow officer what the battle had looked like from afar, Churchill reports that his contemporary replied, dismissively, “It looked like plum duff: brown currants scattered about in a great deal of suet.”

But the adventure that propelled Churchill on to the front pages of the jingoistic British press was his capture by, and daring escape from, the Boers in the episode of The Armoured Train in November 1899. Churchill at this point was not in uniform, but working as a journalist associated with the Morning Post.

None of that inhibited him from acts of considerable bravery when the armoured train on which he was travelling was ambushed by the Boers. Inevitably, he was seized as a prisoner of war (“the least unfortunate kind of prisoner to be”), and just as inevitably, he managed to escape (having failed to argue for his release as a foreign correspondent). By Christmas Eve, he was back in Durban with a wonderful scoop (his own escape) and quickly found himself “a popular hero”, though a few rival newspapers suggested that the Boers would have been entitled to execute him for muddling military and civilian roles.

Back home in England, young Winston’s exploits gave the British press a wonderfully invigorating antidote to the generally depressing diet of news from a war that was going from bad to worse. By the time he returned to London, Churchill had become a tabloid hero (“I received the warmest of welcomes on returning home”) and a “star turn” in the subsequent khaki election, at which he became a Conservative MP for Oldham.

A less secure writer and autobiographer might then have described his service in several cabinets, his career during the first world war, and his political life in the 1920s. But Churchill does not do that. He wanted to keep his book short, by his standards, and he wants to focus on his beginnings. He signs off with the cheerful and insouciant optimism of a man who also battled with depression (“the black dog”):

Events were soon to arise in the fiscal sphere which were to plunge me into new struggles and absorb my thoughts and energies at least until September 1908, when I married and lived happily ever afterwards.

A Signature Sentence

“Young men have often been ruined through owning horses, or through backing horses, but never through riding them; unless of course they break their necks, which, taken at a gallop, is a very good death to die.”

Three to Compare

Siegfried Sassoon: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928)

George Orwell: Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)

Winston Churchill: Their Finest Hour (1949)

My Early Life is published by Eland (£12.99). Click here to buy a copy for £10.65