Michael McMenamin

In this detailed work, Bungay contributes to the historiography of the great air war, notwithstanding several highly questionable conclusions.

“The Churchill Myths” is not about Churchill. It is about how politicians the authors don’t like wrap themselves in Churchill mythology.

How Lord Alfred Douglas was convicted and sent to jail, but was mollified by later events; how he praised his former enemy, and was forgiven.

How Winston Churchill was invited to opine, and Lord Alfred Douglas was affronted by what he saw as an obvious conspiracy with Jewish financiers.

Bouverie’s dismissal of the 1938 plot as “probably correctly” a fantasy is quite inexplicable. He lists Meehan’s book in his bibliography along with the memoirs of Erich Kordt, who wrote that swallowing Hitler’s terms at Munich “prevented the coup d’état in Berlin.” Even Henderson, the pro-Chamberlain British ambassador to Germany, thought the Hitler plot genuine. On 6 October, a week after Munich, Henderson wrote Halifax: “By keeping the peace, we have saved Hitler and his regime.”