And the most vivid thing that people saw during raids were these huge plumes of dust blossoming from destroyed buildings as they collapsed. Diaries and so forth report the smell of cordite. Suddenly at teatime, the Luftwaffe arrives, and the bombs fall throughout the night. People are in the parks, just sunning and so forth. Churchill became prime minister at a moment when Germany was about to carry out a prolonged and devastating aerial bombing campaign. INSKEEP: Larson says he wanted to reconstruct how the U.K. LARSON: (Laughter) As one does, actually, yes.

There is martial music playing on the gramophone, and he proceeds to do bayonet drills in front of all his guests in the great hall at Chequers. And in the midst of war, Larson says Churchill even had a playful side.ĮRIK LARSON: At the prime minister country home Chequers, one evening, actually, after one of these fabulous dinners there, Churchill in his blue siren suit, which is a pale blue one-piece suit that made him, honestly, look like an Easter egg - in the siren suit but also in his flaming gold red dragon dressing gown, he picks up a Mannlicher with a bayonet. He could be angry one moment and jolly the next. At times, he would lash out at his staff. Behind Churchill's inspiring speeches was an eccentric character. 'The Splendid And The Vile' reconstructs one year of Winston Churchill's outsized life, his most famous year beginning in May 1940 when Churchill became prime minister just as a German attack loomed. INSKEEP: Larson's past books have often focused on less famous characters right at the edge of history, like an architect and a mass killer in Chicago or an ambassador to Nazi Germany. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. WINSTON CHURCHILL: We shall fight on the beaches. Erik Larson wrote a book about Winston Churchill, the British prime minister whose inspiring speeches led the U.K. One of today's acclaimed popular historians has taken on one of history's most acclaimed figures.

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