The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz review

Erik Larson's The Splendid and the Vile covers Winston Churchill's first year as British Prime Minister — from May 1940, when he replaced Neville Chamberlain three days after Germany's invasion of the Low Countries, through May 1941. That year encompassed Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the sinking of the Bismarck, and the sustained effort to bring the United States into the war. Larson tells it through diaries, letters, and contemporary accounts — not as a conventional political biography but as a day-by-day narrative of how Churchill, his family, his inner circle, and ordinary Londoners experienced the most sustained aerial assault on a major city in history.

Larson's method is to interweave the grand political narrative with the intimate domestic one. We see Churchill dictating speeches in the bath, his daughter Mary's wartime diary entries, his son-in-law Vic Oliver's fraught relationship with his wife Sarah, the parallel lives of Churchill's scientific adviser Frederick Lindemann and private secretary John Colville. The German side is represented through the diary of Joseph Goebbels and the strategic thinking of Hermann Göring. The effect is to keep the enormous violence and high politics anchored in the texture of daily life: the smell of bombed buildings, the exhaustion of shelter workers, the social complexities of a government under siege.