I can recall few books of mine where my debts are as many as they are for this one. Let me list them according to their relative order, though not necessarily according to their relative importance.
I wish to affirm my appreciation for Yale University Press, with which my relations have been untroubled by the problems and irritations that nowadays beset most authors, and especially for the Press’s editorial director, Jonathan Brent, and superb manuscript editor Brenda W. Kolb. And to the Earhart Foundation and its secretary, Antony Sullivan, who, as often in the past, were ready and willing and generous in offering financial assistance for my researches in England.
My principal research assistant in the Public Record Office was András D. Bán, whose reliability, precision, and thorough knowledge of the intricacies of the PRO files were invaluable. Joanna Shaw Myers volunteered to accompany me to Cambridge, assisting my passage through the large (and exceptionally well catalogued) Churchill Archives. Among British scholars of modern English history, Philip Bell and Brian Bond gave fine advice and often essential guidance, as did David Astor, David Dilks, M. R. D. Foot, and Andrew Roberts. Among American scholars of British literary history, Samuel Hynes offered the same. The librarian at the Foreign Office in London as well as the archivists and keepers of Churchill College and Trinity College at Cambridge University, of the Neville Chamberlain Papers in the library of the University of Birmingham, of the Halifax diaries and papers in the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research at the University of York, of the Mass-Observation Archives in the University of Sussex of Falmer—Brighton, of the Nicolson diaries in the library of Balliol College at Oxford University, of the Astor papers in the library of the University of Reading, and of the library of King’s College in London — all were, without exception, more than benevolent and often especially forthcoming. Edward Baptist, at the University of Pennsylvania, helped in my quest to find books and articles that were not easily available. Helen Hayes, formerly research librarian of Chestnut Hill College, typed a difficult and scribbled-over manuscript under a considerable pressure of time. My wife, Stephanie, reads everything—well, almost everything—that I write; her comments are often funny and incisive, reflections of her sparkling and charming personality, a benison for a manuscript as it is for a man’s life.
1997-98
PICKERING CLOSE
(NEAR PHOENIXVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA)