The historical debate over Britain’s attempt to appease the Third Reich started even before the first German bombs fell on London in the summer of 1940, and, unlike the Blitz, the conflict over it has never ended. The battle lines and combatants have shifted in that time, from self-justifying memoirists to historians providing revisionist and post-revisionist interpretations that draw upon the increasing availability of official records. George Peden’s new book represents the latest sally onto the field, one that revisits British policymaking in the 1930s to provide what he asserts is the first
