Neville Chamberlain

Chamberlain is one of the infamous ‘Guilty Men’ responsible for appeasing Hitler almost to perdition. Indeed, his guilt is the deepest and most ineradicable of all those arraigned alongside him. At best, he was Hitler’s dupe; at worst, almost criminally negligent. Or…was he in fact the country’s saviour? Drawing on fresh evidence and recent scholarship, this new biography argues that without Chamberlain, war would just as certainly have come and that Britain would probably have lost. This in not an apologia for Chamberlain, but it does force us to look afresh at some of our ‘certainties’, many of them formed by Churchill’s immensely influential writings penned in the glow of Nazi defeat.