The controversy stirred up by these two (then young) historians in 1963, when their book first appeared, has not yet entirely died down. Neville Chamberlain's much-debated pro-German policy in the 1930s was prompted by several factors: his fear of another ruinous war, his bad conscience (in company with many other conscientious English people) about the iniquitous Versailles Treaty, his growing estrangement from France, and his feeling that Germany and Britain should now dominate Europe between them. Given any other leader except Hitler, it might well have been a sound one, but trusting him politically was the equivalent of paroling a serial rapist, as Chamberlain himself found out too late. With the rump of Czechoslovakia already gobbled up, the German invasion of Poland proved too much for even committed English Germanophiles to swallow, so Europe - and soon most of the world - went to war. It is a complex and absorbing chapter in history, dealt with dispassionately in a work which already seems to have become a classic of its kind.