The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book moved me and, I must confess, many a time I had tears in my eyes. My mother left London to escape the Nazi bombing which, when you read about it here, was actually
worse than I thought – even though my playgrounds as a child were bombed out ruins, and we had plenty to choose from I can tell you! My mother left and went north to Durham in order to have me in a safe environment. In March of 1941, the snow was very deep, and at twenty-two years old and all alone, she must have been a very lonely girl. My dad, at twenty-six, was fighting those fires of London as a fireman—an experience from which he never recovered and would never discuss.

Larson does a magnificent job telling Churchill’s story from many different points of view: Clementine’s (wife), Mary’s (daughter), Lord Beaverbrook’s and Colville’s (personal secretary), to name a few. The author shows Churchill’s extraordinary resilience against all odds both at home and from within Hitler’s Socialist German Worker’s Party, bent on exterminating the British and evening the score from their defeat of WW1. They promised ‘they’d be back’ and they were, with a vengeance.

I know a book is good when I have to thoroughly read all the back material—like remaining in the cinema after a great film to read each and every credit.

If you enjoy reading about history, great men and women and a heroic story of overcoming evil, you will love Larson’s great work, as I did.




View all my reviews