Splendor and squalor

A gripping portrait of Great Britain during the Blitz and what it was like to live with Churchill.

One would say that we know everything (or almost everything) about Winston Churchill. And yet, as in every life, something always escapes us. And it is there, in those gaps left aside by official or critical historiography, where Erik Larson's exceptional narrative talent comes in. Restricted to a very specific period, from May 1940 to May 1941, the bloodiest period of the Blitz, this book narrates, almost like a novel, "how Churchill and his circle survived daily: the small episodes that reveal what it was really like to live under Hitler's steel storm. That was the moment when Churchill became Churchill, when he delivered his most impressive speeches and showed the world what courage and leadership were."

In this work we have the great statesman, the orator and the leader who never seemed to lose his way, but also the man who doubted his own decisions, the aristocrat and bon vivant who missed his youth, the sentimental and the irascible. The multifaceted Churchill built a character to suit a History with a capital H. Larson recounts it by tracing the chiaroscuro of the minuscule. After all, as Churchill himself told his secretary: "If words mattered, we should win this war."