Fighting Churchill, Appeasing Hitler was published in 2019 by Biteback Publishing in the UK and Pegasus Books in the US. It took a radically new look at the vexed question of British diplomacy in the late 1930s, disentangling the web of motivations and miscalculations that produced one of history's most catastrophic foreign policy episodes.
Adrian shows how British decision-making had become dangerously concentrated on just two men: prime minister, Neville Chamberlain and his chief civil service advisor, Sir Horace Wilson. They pursued a strategy of actively seeking friendship with the Fascist dictators. They treated any opposition to the policy as dangerously irresponsible, above all Churchill's correct understanding of Hitler's evil. Wilson and Churchill were enemies of long standing.
Chamberlain and Wilson fought any attempt to face Hitler down. Hitler saw this as nothing more than weakness and fear, which led him to ever more outrageous acts until war became inevitable.
