Neville Chamberlain

Lifetime friend and trusted collaborator, Louis Spears knew France and the French as few Britons, serving faithfully in peace and war.

Historians tend to downplay Horace Wilson’s contribution to British Appeasement policy in the 1930s. Adrian Phillips fills in the blanks.

However repulsive Chips was, after this first volume, masterfully edited by Simon Heffer, readers will be eager for the rest.

Sinclair aging: “He did so much and worried so greatly on account of the boys who lost their lives…no wonder that he is now a war casualty.”

The Calgary Churchill statue will celebrate Sir Winston’s prescience in peace, resolution in war, and lifetime quest for liberty and human rights.

Winston Churchill was not a man to bear grudges, and firmly admired the Irish. Yet he was strangely oblivious to the widespread, albeit not universal, hostility still felt towards him in nationalist Ireland. In 1953 he faced a libel action in Ireland arising out of his memoirs. It was brought by Eric Dorman-Smith, an Irish-born general whom he had dismissed during the Desert War. He expressed doubt that “an Irish jury would necessarily be unfair or that they would be prejudiced against me.” His legal advisers knew better. They made sure the case was settled before it got to be heard before a jury in Dublin. When Churchill died in 1965, de Valera, now President of Ireland, lauded him as a great Englishman. He could not omit to add the rider that Churchill had been a “dangerous enemy” of the Irish people.

Breathless media admiration of Hitler’s Anschluss obscured German military deficiencies that might have mattered if the democracies had stood firm.

Churchill looked back on the past with reverence and with regularity—thankfully so, for we owe him the same debt we owe to our history: gratitude.

Clews paints a loyal but frustrated Churchill who later defined the rule of the Phoney War: “Don’t be unkind to the enemy; you will only make him angry.”

It was not a broadcast appeal to the nation. Nothing so vague as that for Winston S. Churchill. It was his order to the Admiralty on 20 May 1940. The Admiralty then formed the Small Vessels Pool, in which private owners registered their craft for the mission and were given routes and charts.

McKinstry is thorough and scrupulously fair. Unlike too many historians today, he goes in with no axes to grind. He simply tells the story, backed by a voluminous bibliography, extensive research and private correspondence. In scope and balance, the book reminds us of Arthur Herman’s Gandhi and Churchill—another elegant account of two contentious figures. Like Herman, McKinstry captures Churchill’s generosity of spirit, and his rival’s greatness of soul.

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.”