Churchill adored him, rejecting Beaverbrook’s resignations 14 times.

Another main character is the Canadian-born newspaper mogul, Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Air Production, eventually Minister of just about everything. In fact the title of the book, “The Splendid and the Vile' comes from a remark, slightly altered, in a diary entry by Churchill’s lovelorn private secretary John Conville, as he watched a night raid through a big window, bombs falling on London. Other figures emerge who tend to be ignored by Churchill scholars and become like characters in a novel. Quirky, risk-taking, flamboyant - a nighthawk, holding important meetings at 10 Downing Street and his country estate, moseying around in colorful silk robes, or naked, working in his bathtub, jabbing away with a cigar, soused often but always rhetorically superb. Larson’s book is another take on Churchill, that larger than life icon who was not King George’s first choice for Prime Minister. I wondered then how Londoners, particularly, coped – ordinary citizens as well as political leaders.” What Larson does not say, however, and what I think gives his theme added power, is that he may not have been in New York on 9/11, but the city had once been his home. In an opening Note to Readers, Larson says the 9/11 attacks prompted the book: “It was only when I moved to Manhattan a few years ago that I came to understand, with sudden clarity, how different the experience of September 11, 2001, had been for New Yorkers than for those of us who watched the nightmare unfold at a distance. The figures are exploring and touching what remains. Two shelves are still standing in the debris. A striking frontispiece photo, the only one in the book, shows three lone figures amid destruction of what was once the Holland House Library in Kensington. You’ll zip through in admiration and suspense, marveling at Larson’s perspective on the months between May 1940 and May1941, when Germany confidently, violently and nonstop sent its sophisticated bombers and fighters to annihilate English cities and the countryside. Subtitled “A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz,” The Splendid and the Vile, over 500 pages, is worth every word.

Erik Larson is so good a storyteller that as you read through The Splendid and the Vile, his magnificent saga of Winston Churchill during the bombing of Britain - “the year Churchill became Churchill,” as Larson says - you wonder how it will all turn out! The book is what’s been said of Larson’s earlier works: “addictively readable.”

Splendid and the vile book