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

by Erik Larson

Churchill was particularly insistent that ministers compose memoranda with brevity and limit their length to one page or less. “It is slothful not to compress your thoughts,” he said.

“Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”

“There was not a soul to whom one could disclose one’s inward anxieties without risking the calamitous effects of lack of confidence, demoralization, doubts, and all those insidious workings which undermine the power of resistance.”

“We seek no treasure,” Churchill said, “we seek no territorial gains, we seek only the right of man to be free; we seek his right to worship his God, to lead his life in his own way, secure from persecution. As the humble laborer returns from his work when the day is done, and sees the smoke curling upwards from his cottage home in the serene evening sky, we wish him to know that no rat-a-tat-tat”—here Churchill knocked loudly on the table—“of the secret police upon his door will disturb his leisure or interrupt his rest.” He said Britain sought only government by popular consent, freedom to say whatever one wished, and the equality of all people in the eyes of the law.

In the mid-1930s, to encourage rail travel to the West, he directed the construction of a vast ski resort in Idaho, called Sun Valley.