VOTED the Greatest Briton in the recent BBC TV series -- as we forecast he would be on our TV pages -- Winston Churchill packed more into the years between his birth in 1874 and death in 1965 than just about anyone else on this planet.

His life and times were almost beyond even the realms of fiction and he bestrode important world events like a latter-day colossus.

More books have probably been written about him and his role in the 20th century than any other person in recent times and three well-researched and written

accounts of his life have just landed on the bookshelves.

Most readers are familiar with his exploits during the Second World War, but how many realise that the episodes of his youth are just as fascinating? I recall reading his autobiography of the first part of his existence My Early Life as part of a GCE O-Level course and finding Churchill's adventures in his 20s were like something straight out of a Boy's Own magazine.

On his 21st birthday, Churchill found himself under fire with Spanish troops fighting rebels in Cuba. Soon afterwards, he was reporting as a war correspondent on the fight against Pathan tribesmen on India's North-west frontier. Then, in 1898, he took part in a major British cavalry charge against the Dervishes during the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan.

He followed these adventures with a failed experience as a Tory parliamentary candidate at Oldham, and then went off to the battlefields again, this time during the turn-of-the-century Boer War in South Africa, where his capture by the enemy forces and subsequent escape reads like a movie script.

The episode did his political ambition no end of good. He was elected MP for Oldham in 1900, became Under Secretary for the Colonies by 1906, President of the Board of Trade in 1908, and Home Secretary in 1910. And his life in politics still had almost half a century to run.

His early life, role in both world wars, the years between them and in the post-Second World War age is equally well covered in all three of these books.

John Keegan, perhaps our foremost military historian, offers, in his concise and vivid biography, a personal account of the life of Churchill.

A schoolboy during the Second World War, Keegan admits to being immune to the Churchillian legend until he was on a postgraduate tour of the United States and staying at a friend's flat in New York, where he found a recording of Churchill's war speeches. On listening to it, "the effect was electrifying" and left him suffused for the first time with an "unaccustomed sense of pride in country and then with a pride in common citizenship".

Keegan's appreciation of Churchill goes on to look at his origins; his early career in the Boer War; his rapid rise politically; his marriage to the highly influential Clementine; and how, even today, four decades after his death, "the glow of military achievement and the splendour of empire have faded almost away, but a true glory continues to gleam over Churchill's life, words and works".

Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister and leader of the wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, is an Olympian figure. When he died in 1965, writes Sebastian Haffner in his book, "one might have thought that it was not a man who was being borne to his grave, but British history itself". Today, more than 50 years after he won the war -- and lost the General Election -- Winston Churchill is once more the man of the moment and his finest hour may yet again be upon us. On the night of the infamous New York events of September 11, 2001, his biography was on the bedside table of the then New York mayor, Rudolph Giuliani; now his bust sits on the Oval office desk of President George Bush.

Haffner is plainly fascinated by British history. Compared to other British prime ministers of the 20th century -- Lloyd George, Baldwin, Chamberlain, Attlee -- Churchill seems like an alien from another world. To classify him correctly, Haffner maintains, we need to think of other, older names: Cromwell, Frederick the Great, Napoleon and his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, whose cast of mind he inherited. All of these men were strategists, politicians and diplomats, but, as Napoleon said of himself, they were "born for war". And yet, this wonderfully vivid study of a character and the British character by an exceptionally perceptive outsider -- which places Churchill the warrior, the artist and the adventurer alongside Churchill the statesman -- although positive is definitely not a whitewash.

Robert Blake has written many books and his pocket biography of Churchill is both well researched and illustrated and eminently readable.

It also contains a clear and concise chronology of the famous statesman's life and times.

E Churchill by John Keegan, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £14.99.

Rating ****

Churchill by Sebastian Haffner (translated by John Brownjohn) Haus Publishing, London, £8.99.

Rating ***

Winston Churchill by Robert Blake. Published by Sutton, £7.99.

Rating ****