45. Examples from Sheila Lawlor (an estimable historian) in her Churchill and the Politics of War: “John Charmless provocative biography … has been taken by supporters and detractors alike to remove the trappings of myth which Churchill wove around his own conduct. But for the early years of the war, the treatment is uncontroversial” (18). “Trappings of myth”: perhaps. “Uncontroversial”: no. Lawlor continues: Churchill ‘Svas helped by events themselves — the fall of France, Holland, and Belgium and the attack on Britain herself—and by his own reaction to them. His earlier characteristics of reaction and bombast.…” (43). Two different reactions? “Churchill’s decision to fight on was more reasonable and had more in common with that of Chamberlain and Halifax than his rhetoric might suggest, but it was his rhetoric which, in the summer of 1940, had begun to cast him into his wartime caricature” (87). Caricature? Image, rather: for an image is not independent from reality, whereas a caricature is but a part of it. About Chamberlain, she says: “Churchill, though insisting there should be no scapegoats, that all were equally responsible, that they were ‘all guilty’ — nonetheless did not stop the critics” (89). Yes, he did: and the result was most beneficial for his relationship with Chamberlain.

46. Hillgruber, a principal German historian of the Second World War, wrote in his massive and important book Hitlers Strategie, 144 n. 1, that “from his viewpoint” Hitler’s offers to Britain were “seriously meant” and “subjectively, honest.”