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This is not my review, but it is from Thomas West's blog




Learning to See

The theme of the late-bloomer reappears again and again with Churchill. He was not an early reader, but greatly loved reading once he became proficient. He had difficulty with speech as a youth, but developed, in time, an extraordinary sensitivity and skill with language. He seemed to be poor in nearly every aspect of school, until his late teens when, at Sandhurst, he developed with great rapidity--feeling himself "growing up almost every week"--then finishing well ahead of most of his peers. Even his great love of painting was developed quite late, when he was middle-aged. And, of course, his greatest achievements during World War II were reserved for the years in which most would have already gone into retirement (and some time after he and others regarded his political career as essentially "finished").



What, then, can be said of his education as a writer and historian? His education during his years at Harrow (where, after all, he did not do very well) would not seem sufficient to explain his great skill or depth of knowledge and understanding in later years. Nor would even his oft-repeated study of elementary English composition and grammar. His years at Sandhurst were designed for the active and practical military professional, not to provide a background in the literature of the military historian.


Where and when had he read the great authors, to provide a base for his native writing skills? Once again, late-blooming seems the answer and seems the dominant pattern. Like Faraday, Churchill started late but he never stopped. And he followed his own program, in his own time, for his own purposes.


After Sandhurst, and after brief exciting exploits in Cuba, he was posted with his British Army unit to India. During this time, he entered upon a program of reading to correct the deficiencies of Harrow and Sandhurst. If we are correct in asserting that Churchill developed capabilities greater than others, but later than others (as some of those we have been considering), then it is not hard to imagine that his program of self study had the right timing and conditions for the greatest benefit (perhaps much greater than one would usually obtain as part of a conventional university program of study).


In India, Churchill had apparently taken well to the easy routine of military duties and regimental competitions. But when his need for deeper and broader knowledge came it was abrupt and strong: "It was not until this winter of 1896, when I had almost completed my twenty-second year, that the desire for learning came upon me. I began to feel myself wanting in even the vaguest knowledge about many large spheres of thought."


By this time, he had developed a feeling for language and an appreciation for words "fitting and falling into their places like pennies in the slot." He had developed a extensive vocabulary, yet he was aware that he was not always sure of the meaning of certain words and was hesitant to use them "for fear of being absurd." He was aware that he knew something about a variety of topics, such as tactics or politics or honorable behaviour. But what of a topic such as ethics? ". . . In Bangalore there was no one to tell me about Ethics for love or money. . . . This was only typical of a dozen similar mental needs that now began to press insistently upon me. I knew of course that the youths at the universities were stuffed with all this patter at nineteen and twenty, and could pose you entrapping questions or give baffling answers. We never set much store by them or their affected superiority, remembering that they were only at their books, while we were commanding men and guarding the Empire. Nevertheless I had sometimes resented the apt and copious information which some of them seemed to possess, and I now wished I could find a competent teacher whom I could listen to and cross-examine for an hour or so every day."


So without an instructor, he taught himself. He wrote to ask his mother to send him books. He started with Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: "I was immediately dominated both by the story and the style. All through the long glistening middle hours of the Indian day, from when we quited stables till the evening shadows proclaimed the hour of polo, I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all. I scribbled all my opinions on the margins of the pages. . . It was a curious education . . . because I approached it with an empty, hungry mind, and with fairly strong jaws; and what I got I bit. . . ."


For a time during this period he read history and philosophy four or five hours each day. In addition to Gibbon, he read Plato, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Malthus, Darwin and many other books of "lesser standing." The education was "curious" but effective. As one biographer commented: "In fact, it was a very wide and remarkable one; Churchill's selection of books was eclectic and random, but the purpose was serious: what he read he remembered, and he challenged and questioned what he read. This self-education was the first real indication of his ability, his determination, and his independence. It may also be seen as the first clear sign of a personal ambition to succeed in life."