Books

First Odhams edition, first printing, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the initial binder's blank "To K. Timberlake from Winston S. Churchill Christmas 1947" above a drawing of a bull. We cannot identify the recipient, though it is perhaps a person involved with the herd of Belted Galloway cattle that Churchill kept at Chartwell - in autumn 1947, he acquired six new cows. "Churchill cherished the bovine race... He began to acquire a treasured dairy herd... Churchill experienced a series of ups and downs with his own cattle. He farmed imaginatively rather than practically and spent more than he earned on ambitious schemes at Chartwell" (Brendon, pp. 83-4). After the Second World War, he was able to expand, buying neighbouring farms to Chartwell and the cattle to go with them. "Within a few years he had two milking herds which he valued for their financial worth, their ornamental character and their pedigree quality" (ibid., p. 84). Among his most widely read works, My Early Life provides an entertaining account of his childhood, schooldays at Harrow, military training at Sandhurst, experiences as a war correspondent in Cuba, service attached to the Malakand Field Force in the North-West Frontier Province of India, charging with the 21st Lancers at Omdurman, and as a POW in South Africa during the Boer War. Overall, it gives a "witty and elegiac account of his youth shot through with regret at the decline of the social and imperial order in which he had grown up" (ODNB). It was first published in 1930. Provenance: the collection of Steve Forbes. READ MORE Octavo (209 x 134 mm). Contemporary red morocco by Zaehnsdorf, spine lettered in gilt, double gilt fillet to covers, gilt facsimile signature to front cover, gilt turn-ins, marbled endpapers, gilt edges. Frontispiece and 8 plates; maps, plans and illustrations to the text (1 double-page, 6 full-page). Light discoloration to morocco, contents a little toned with some light spotting. A very good copy. Cohen A91.9.a or b (only distinguishable by original binding). Piers Brendon, Churchill's Bestiary, 2018.

My Early Life is an autobiographical work by Winston Churchill. It covers his birth in 1874 to his first few years in Parliament.