In our time

When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from his Munich meetings with Adolf Hitler in September 1938, he proclaimed that he held in his hands a document guaranteeing "peace in our time." In the decades since, Chamberlain's folly has become the occasion for a commonplace historical lesson: that when the "good" innocently accept the assurances of the "evil," the result is catastrophic. Clement Leibovitz challenge the familiar understanding of Munich as the product of a naïve "appeasement" of Nazi appetites. They argue that it was the culmination of cynical collaboration between the Tory government and the Nazis in the 1930s. Based upon a careful reading of official and unofficial correspondence, conference notes, cabinet minute, and diaries, In Our Time documents the steps taken under diplomatic cover by the West to strike a bargain based upon shared anti-Soviet premises.