Making Friends with Hitler

Sep 21, 2024 1:17 PM

Author:Ian Kershaw

Britain, as the most powerful of the European victors of World War One, had a unique responsibility to maintain the peace in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles. The outbreak of a second, even more catastrophic war in 1939 has therefore always raised painful questions about Britain's failure to deal with Nazism. Could some other course of action have destroyed Hitler when he was still weak? In this highly disturbing new book, Ian Kershaw examines this crucial issue. He concentrates on the figure of Lord Londonderry - grandee, patriot, cousin of Churchill and the government minister responsible for the RAF at a crucial point in its existence. Londonderry's reaction to the rise of Hitler-to pursue friendship with the Nazis at all costs-raises fundamental questions about Britain's role in the 1930s and whether in practice there was ever any possibility of preventing Hitler's leading Europe once again into war.

Reviews

The world's greatest public intellectual

—— Observer

One of the finest minds of the twentieth century

—— The New Yorker

When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky's work will survive

—— Arundhati Roy

A rebel without a pause

—— Bono

The sound of real human voices: bewildered, sad, often angry, sometimes bitter, but for the most part remarkable ... a shattered relay-race of narrative gives the book a ghostly, choric poetry

—— Telegraph

...Breathe a sense of immediacy, of being there on the spot; and the spot is, only too often, a place of horror...thoroughly readable by anyone who wants to know what it felt like to be engaged in a world war....That war is horrible, no sensible reader can doubt; that this war was worth fighting, to get rid of barbaric regimes, comes across well

—— Spectator

As powerful and authoritative an account of the battle for Normandy as we are likely to get in this generation

—— Max Hastings , Sunday Times

A brilliantly co-ordinated and almost overwhelmingly upsetting history. Beevor is singularly expert at homing in on those telltale human details that reveal just what it would have been like to be in Normandy in the summer of 1944

—— Craig Brown , Mail on Sunday

No writer can surpass Beevor in making sense of a crowded battlefield and in balancing the explanation of tactical manoeuvres with poignant flashes of human detail

—— Christopher Silvester , Daily Express

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