Neville Chamberlain in 1938 on his way to meet Hitler before the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia

This book told me something I hadn’t realised: “appeasement” isn’t simply a pejorative used by critics of the policy of not confronting Hitler, but a term embraced by its proponents. Neville Chamberlain would happily have described himself as an appeaser.

The reason this is a surprise is that the word, and the policy, became so discredited after 1940 that it has never been used except as a criticism. Appeasement, we all know, resulted in Nazi Germany’s rise and Hitler’s conquest of most of continental Europe.

Yet more recently a revisionist historiography has blossomed. This paints Chamberlain as a maligned super-pragmatist, limited by the semi-pacifist sentiment among voters, who used appeasement as a tool to gain time for Britain to rearm against the coming storm. Revisionists