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

by Erik Larson

Here, as in other speeches, Churchill demonstrated a striking trait: his knack for making people feel loftier, stronger, and, above all, more courageous.

“We shall go on to the end,” he said, in a crescendo of ferocity and confidence. “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender—”

“Always remember, Clemmie, that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”

In an aside to his own parliamentary secretary, Churchill said, “Love me, love my dog, and if you don’t love my dog you damn well can’t love me.”

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

benignant,

Their mother, Edith Starr Miller, seemed a match for Queenborough. An anti-Semite, she described herself as an “international political investigator” and wrote a seven-hundred-page volume entitled Occult Theocrasy, in which she sought to expose an international conspiracy by Jews, Freemasons, the Illuminati, and others “to penetrate, dominate and destroy not only the so-called

upper classes, but also the better portion of all classes.”