The Chamberlain Litany: Letters Within a Governing Family from Empire to Appeasement

The Chamberlain Litany: Letters Within a Governing Family from Empire to Appeasement
ISBN-10
1906598630
ISBN-13
9781906598631
Category
Biography & Autobiography
Pages
395
Language
English
Published
2010
Publisher
Haus Pub
Author
Peter T. Marsh

Description

Praise for Peter T. Marsh's Joseph 'Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics '...much the best of the single-volume-lives...clearly written, easy to follow, based on exhaustive research... and laced with passages of lasting interest.'-The Economist 'an...unqualified success: the central figure emerges as a fascinating figure of enduring relevance.'-The Manchester Guardian Weekly Bereft of a mother and with a largely absent father, the children of Joseph Chamberlain, the pivotal British statesman of his day, clung to each other as they grew up, maintaining a lengthy and lifelong correspondence. 'Reading these letters is like eavesdropping', Peter Marsh tells us, and it sheds light on the stories that the children told themselves about their place in the world, and about their own future and that of their country. Hilda, one of the youngest, eventually claimed to see a pattern repeated in the lives of her father and brothers; each overcame the setbacks experienced by his predecessor and then stood on his shoulders to reach ever higher. Her song reached its climax when Neville met Hitler at Munich on the brink of war and managed to preserve the peace. But Hilda had reckoned without the last and greatest adversary of the Chamberlains: Churchill. His achievement, first in winning the war that Neville had failed to avert and then in writing a history of that war which damned Neville for its outbreak, forced Hilda to change her interpretation of the Chamberlains' story from a litany of praise into a lament.

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