Historians have been waiting a long time for a definitive biography of Neville Chamberlain to replace the official one written by Sir Keith Feiling as long ago as 1946. There have been useful contributions to the study of Chamberlain's career by such authors as Ian Macleod (1961) and H. Montgomery Hyde (1976), but David Dilks sadly never produced a second volume to supplement his weighty first, which ended in 1929. Dilks's volume was published in 1984, and, although David Dutton produced an invaluable study of Chamberlain in 2001, it was not a biography in the traditional sense, which a second Dilks's volume would have been.

It was with some anticipation, therefore, that I approached the reading of Robert Self's new biography. It is substantial, with 453 pages of main text and almost one hundred pages of notes, references, and guides to sources. Indeed, the publishers claim that “it is not exaggeration to say that the author has surveyed virtually all the existing archival material written by or to Chamberlain” (quoted from book jacket). This is rightly acknowledged, but it is unfortunate (and surprising) that a book of this potential importance has no proper bibliography.

No one can fault Self's diligence in consulting Chamberlain's papers, but the overall result is a disappointment because the writer's expertise on domestic British politics is not matched by his grasp of international affairs, even though the publishers claim that he is a specialist in international history. The opportunity to provide a definitive and convincing appraisal of Chamberlain's conduct of foreign policy between 1937 and 1939 is largely missed, and the author does not show the sureness of touch in this area that he demonstrates in the analysis of domestic politics and Neville Chamberlain's part in it.

The book has its strengths. The author has edited the Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters and has been able to use this material to underline the wretchedness of young Neville's experience on the island of Andros, where a misconceived plan to grow sisal (for which his father Joe was to blame) failed, and its impact on the rest of his life. The descriptions of Chamberlain's relationships with his half brother Austen and his sisters Ida and Hilda are well handled, as are political aspects such as the tensions between Chamberlain and Baldwin when the latter was party leader and prime minister (although, surprisingly, there is no reference in the notes to Philip Williamson's 1999 study of Baldwin).

As indicated above, the problems arise when the author turns to deal with foreign policy both before and after Chamberlain's assumption of the premiership in May 1937. The extensive footnotes are revealing here. The notes for chapter 7, for example, which deal with the economic crisis of 1930–31 and the fall of the second Labour government, are replete with references to appropriate academic journals. But in two chapters leading up to and covering Munich, the writer could find no reference to the sort of specialist journals on British and European foreign policy that one would expect. Likewise, on the German side, only Kershaw's biography of Hitler seems to have been used, alongside Paul Schmidt's memoir (much literature has now been published on the German anti-Nazi opposition, for example, and Chamberlain's reaction to it). This leaves the reader with an Anglocentric view of what was happening. To demonstrate this point further, Self fails to name Czech President Benes once in his analysis of appeasement (by contrast Feiling had ten references). And the Polish Foreign Minister Beck, surely a significant player in the events of 1938–39, similarly fails to receive a mention. This does contrast rather strongly with the attention paid post-Munich to the views of the relatively obscure junior minister, Harry Crookshank (331–32).

Another problem concerns the handling of the Munich crisis and its aftermath. Self correctly stresses the ambivalence of parliamentary and public opinion about Munich in its wake. But there is no rounded discussion of whether, for example, Chamberlain's assessment of Soviet intentions in 1938 was accurate. One looks in vain for any awareness of the recent work done by historians like Igor Lukes or Hugh Ragsdale. Refutation of Churchill's Grand Alliance strategy surely demands some reference to the intentions of the USSR during the Czech crisis. Or, if the writer supports this view, like the late R. A. C. Parker, then the reader needs some explanation of why Chamberlain's lack of faith in the USSR in September 1938 was misconceived. As it is, the crisis appears to be a purely Anglo-French affair with Germany with very limited reference to Czechoslovakia and its internal dynamics (I could find no reference to Czech-Slovak tensions or the Polish Hungarian minorities whose attitudes actually supported Chamberlain's analysis of the problem).

The impression, thus, is of a study that is out of kilter and does not rise to the challenge presented by the nonappearance of David Dilks's second volume, which would have covered appeasement. Either the foreign policy coverage of the thirties should have been extended to make a bigger book or the domestic coverage in the existing text ought to have been shortened. The author rightly gives credit to Chamberlain as a significant social reformer and manager of the economy, but if one wishes to engage with the antiappeasement Churchillian critique (as, for example, the book does with its justified assault on the absurdities of Cato's Guilty Men), then more than just two brief references, on pages 255 and 360, are needed to the Rhineland crisis of 1936. Churchill set much store by British “failure” to respond to Hitler's illegal move in The Gathering Storm, published in 1948, although his written comments then contrasted sharply with what he was saying at the time. Modern research has clearly shown the Rhineland crisis did not merit the attention that Churchill attached to it as a turning point in his book, but Self does not engage with this issue at all.

It is also difficult to discern whether Self really has much respect for his subject. There are several references to “hubris” with an odd link being made (299–300) between Chamberlain's behavior over the Irish Treaty Ports issues and Munich. According to Self, Chamberlain's success in reaching agreement with de Valera and the Free State Government “fuelled the overweening hubris that led directly to the Munich Conference five months later” (300). In fact, as Robert Fisk's In Time of War showed some twenty years ago (supposedly consulted by the author), it was Churchill rather than Chamberlain who was guilty of hubris. He showed scant interest in the rights of neutral states, as the Norwegian campaign demonstrated, and was outraged by Eire's insistence on exercising its sovereign right to remain neutral. A neutrality, however, that was benign to a degree, as far as Britain was concerned. Free State fire engines were sent to aid bombed-out Belfast, and downed German fliers in Eire were handed over to the northern Ireland authorities. Nor did the de Valera government stop thousands of southern Irishmen from joining crown forces. This is a small example to focus on, but it does highlight an ambiguity toward his subject, which is a feature of the book. Self rightly credits Chamberlain with putting the Royal Air Force on an up-to-date war footing, but it seems to me that he could have made more of this point and the crucial one, that it was French strategic ineptitude in 1940 that was the primary cause of the disaster then. Even if Chamberlain had sent seventeen or twenty divisions to France (as critics like Vansittart wanted), there is no reason to suggest that the outcome of the Battle of France would have been affected. An even bigger Dunkirk would have been the consequence, for which Chamberlain would not have been responsible.

The book, then, remains a curate's egg, good in parts. Sound analysis is combined with stylistic stodginess in places, but, most crucially, we still want a thorough, up-to-date analysis of the appeasement era that puts British foreign policy in a wider, more nuanced context while analyzing Chamberlain's part in its evolution and his personal responsibility for what happened.