Finest hour - Phil Craig

This powerful and incisive account of the events of 1940, told through the voices, diaries, letters and memoirs of the men and women who survived it - and those who lost their lives - provides fascinating and often controversial new insights into the conflicts and the politics of the period. Finest Hour tells the story of how Britain's darkest hour eventually became its finest.

' Craig digs beneath the time-worn legend of stiff-upper-lip English pluckiness to show a far more complex, more human and more moving picture of the human spirit under stress. An intriguing collection of Britons, rich and poor, give vivid, wonderfully told examples of cowardice becoming valor, of shrapnel-swapping among blitz-happy schoolboys, of a summer of exceptional natural beauty and obscenely unnatural death ... The BBC have ... rarely produced any finer hours than these.' - Washington Post