"The author", the jacket-blurb tells us, "is a granddaughter of Sir Winston Churchill. Her mother was Churchill's eldest daughter, Diana, and her father was Lord Duncan-Sandys, the former Cabinet Minister." That's some pedigree, for better or for worse. Sandys covers the same material as Churchill himself did in his enthralling My Early Life 1874-1904--his extraordinary adventures as a journalist in South Africa during the South African Wars--capture, escape, derring-do. Her status as a family member does not give her any particularly privileged perspective, but what it does do is to permit her a wonderfully louche hero-worshipping tone.Her Churchill is a flawless, marvellous British hero; extraordinarily brave in the face of battle, energetic, resourceful. Purple prose describes Churchill's brilliant nature; chapters have titles like "A Knight Errant" and "A Triumphal Progress". Even his journalism is represented as having the tint of a Golden Age ("...conjures genuine excitement". Short staccato sentences are set against melodious passages: "he must rank amongst the greatest war correspondents"). In a more detached biographer this would all come over as a little vulgar, not to say unbalanced, but a memoir of one's grandfather is a slightly different thing. More to the point Sandys pretty much pulls it off: the reader gets swept along in the whole brightly-coloured brio of the thing. Surprisingly refreshing in its shameless puffing. --Adam Roberts