Andrew Roberts

Guilty?

The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters, Volume IV: The Downing Street Years, 1934–1940

By

Ashgate 588pp £82.50 order from our bookshop

Neville Chamberlain was nothing if not a diligent correspondent. Every week he wrote to his sisters Ida and Hilda letters that were in effect a diary of everything he was doing politically. They have long been invaluable for historians in archive form, but now they have finally been published in extenso, along with a scholarly fifty-page introduction and helpful footnotes by their very diligent editor, Robert Self. There is also a glossary of nicknames so that readers will be able to identify ‘The All-Highest’ (Lord Curzon), ‘The Goat’ (Lloyd George), ‘Our Herb’ (Herbert Samuel), and so on. Self marks the triumphant conclusion of a five-year endeavour with this, the fourth and last volume, which covers Chamberlain from January 1934 until his death in November 1940.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Stuck for a gift idea for Father's Day? Subscribe to Literary Review and get a FREE copy of 'An Impeccable Spy' –… ,
    • 'Gone. All gone. The ease, the pleasure, the effortless eloquence' From May 1995, Margaret Forster's withering rev… ,
    • RT : SO excited to tell you about this event! 😆 The amazing digital colourist, will be joining w… ,
    • 'Peters was unashamed and evidently unshamable, an impostor who wholly inhabited his fabrications and who indignant… ,
    • ‘At every waking moment Barbara Hepworth was aware of herself as a woman paving the way in a man’s world’ From the… ,
    • The entertaining Howard Jacobson is in conversation with Prof John Mullan at the Queen’s Park Book Festival on Sund… ,
    • 'A modest and retiring man, Thompson spent his life describing apple varieties and recommending the best – Ribston… ,
    Follow Us