He climbs to the rooftops of London to survey enemy bombing attacks. Like a daredevil, he flies over to France on a mission to try to help the French fight off the Nazi threat. Larson dramatizes Churchill’s indisputable bravery with example after example of the titanium spine in his somewhat rotund physique. Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler loom off in the shadows, calling their shots. Averell Harriman and German leaders Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels. During the 12 months until May 10, 1941, Britain faced a life-or-death struggle, and Larson’s narrative explains in engrossing detail how a singular person instilled the fortitude in others to confront that struggle with determination and without despair.ĭetailed stories about Churchill’s wartime leadership abound throughout the volume, but Larson’s approach is panoramic, capturing the contextual circumstances of the time and depicting key figures with a connection to this “indomitable Englishman.”Ĭhurchill’s family, particularly wife Clementine, youngest daughter Mary and son Randolph, play important roles in the “saga,” as do Randolph’s wife, Pamela, minister of aircraft production Lord Beaverbrook, private secretary John Colville, American emissaries Harry Hopkins and W. The principal focus of The Splendid and the Vile is Churchill’s first - and most consequential - year as prime minister.

His characters come to life on the page - and they’re all real. They’re part history, part thriller, part romance, part sociological study and part psychological portrait. His nonfiction works become difficult to classify. That date, which will live in the opposite of infamy (to invert Franklin Roosevelt’s memorable phrase after Pearl Harbor), is Erik Larson’s starting point in The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz.Īuthor of The Devil in the White City, Dead Wake and In the Garden of Beasts, Larson writes about the past with the skill one admires in the most talented creators of fiction. What Roberts had written - all 1,105 pages - quickly and justifiably became a bestseller, proving that readers on both sides of the Atlantic continue to find the “British Bulldog” as fascinating - and as heroic - as he’s been since becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom on May 10, 1940. When Andrew Roberts was promoting his recent doorstop of a book, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, he invariably informed audiences that it was the “1,010th biography” about his subject, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill.

And the vile