Esplendor y vileza

It seems that we know everything (or almost everything) of Winston Churchill. And yet, as in all life, something always eludes us. And it is there, in those loopholes left aside by official or critical historiography, where Erik Larson's exceptional narrative talent enters. Circumscribed 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 on a daily basis: the small episodes that reveal how people lived in true under Hitler's tempest of steel. That was the moment Churchill became Churchill, when he made 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 the north, but also the man who doubted his own decisions, the aristocrat and bon vivant who missed his youth, the sentimental and the angry . The polyhedral Churchill built himself a character as a story with a capital letter. Larson tells it by tracing the chiaroscuro of the lowercase letters. After all, as Churchill himself said to his secretary: "If words mattered, we should win this war."