The Chamberlain Litany: Letters within a Governing Family from Empire to Appeasement Hardcover – 1 May 2010

A wonderful book about a fascinating family

Excellent

This is a truly wonderful book,of enormous interest for anyone who prefers history which lives in a deeply true way to the usual kind of propaganda .The Chamberlains come alive in the book through Peter Marsh's faithful and painstaking work in the archives of the family in Birmingham.One gets rhe sense of a flow of personal experience flowing into public life and being modified by the changing world around them over a period of 70 or 80 years.What historians need so much is a way of showing the life of a public figure within the contexts of personal and family background and simultaneously within public or political contexts , but hardly ever will these all be visible in the way that happens in this book.We have in a sense summaries which create a compelling narrative in which ,not just Joe,Austen and Neville spring to life but the wonderful sisters and wives with all their idiosyncrasies and sidelines thgrough their mutual correspondence.I venture to say that even sceptics and enemies of the Chamberlains would find something compelling in this account which unfolds almost like an epic or saga from the ancient world and yet in a totally unpretentious way.Something almost Shakespearian, culminating in the inevitable Munich tragedy.How one wishes Schiller were alive and would create a trilogy based on this book like his 'Wallenstein" !So for anyone interested in divining the sources of history one can only deeply recommend this book and indeed the author's biography of Joseph ChamberlainJoseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics