Finest Hour - Couverture souple

Brilliant ... This highly informative, moving series should form part of the National Curriculum. (Daily Mail)

Beautifully made ... Achingly vivid. (Guardian)

Manages to construct the tale in such a way that it breaks free of the text-book approach to transfix the viewer completely; the archive footage, the witness testimonies ...of such superior quality and so beautifully shot that the whole is fresh and absorbing ... Compiled with a pace that could put a lot of thrillers to shame, the result is television at its very best. (Time Out)

From fighter-pilots risking their lives in the skies above England, to squaddies stranded at Dunkirk, to schoolgirls sent abroad to Canada (the book is worth buying just for Bess Walder's account of horror and redemption aboard the City of Benares), this is riveting. (Sunday Express)

But 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 ... WGBH Boston and the BBC, which teamed up with Brook Lapping Productions to retell this great and important story, have had their share of television triumphs. They have rarely, however, produced any finer hours than these. (Washington Post)

This finely wrought PBS documentary is a remarkable story of determined, against-the-odds resistance, led by the staunch, inspirational Churchill. The producers tell it all in careful fashion, melding historical documents and experts, old footage, and, most powerfully, the testimony of regular folk who lived through it. Yes you can find WWII documentaries aplenty on cable these days. But you have to search long and hard to find one with this kind of richness in the reporting and craftsmanship in the telling. (Chicago Herald Tribune)

A wonderful oral history of Great Britain during the Dunkirk evacuation and the Battle of Britain in the tradition of Stephan Ambrose; recommended for all collections. (US Library Journal)

Compelling ... Mesmerizing stuff. (Sunday Telegraph)

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