Excerpts:

Every generation cherishes illusions which baffle its successors (who passionately defend their own), but intellectuals are expected to view the world with a healthy skepticism. Those who visited the soviet union in the starkest years of the Depression were so easily deceived, so eager to accept the flimsiest evidence, so determined to believe the most transparent misrepresentations, that one feels that some of the scorn directed nowadays at the appeasers of Nazi Germany should be reserved for men who ought to have known better. Bernard Baruch asked Lincoln Steffens, "So, you've been over into Russia?" and Steffens replied: "I have been over into the future, and it works."

He had seen what Stalin wanted him to see, on a rigged tour, the kind generals stage for visiting politicians. Everything paraded by him had worked, but he had not seen into the future or even the present. As one of the most celebrated journalists of his time, Steffens should have investigated his host's policy of collectivization and its ghastly results. Only a willing dupe could say of such a holocaust that it worked. If it did, so did Auschwitz.

Actually, the moral top of Edmund Wilson's world, where the light never really went out, had entered a period of murk which masked monstrous crimes - crimes which were suspected but not acknowledged until Nikita Khrushchev revealed them in 1957 - all committed in the name of the people they were destroying. The catastrophe had begun with Lenin's death in 1924. Churchill, his archenemy, nevertheless recognized Lenin's greatness: "The strong illuminant that guided him was cut off at the moment when he had turned resolutely for home. The Russian people were left floundering in the bog. Their worst misfortune was his birth; their next worst -- his death."

Lenin had left a vague "political statement" which recommended that Joseph Stalin, then secretary-general of the Communist party's Central Committee, be dismissed. Stalin suppressed this document and, in his role as secretary-general, joined two accomplices in a ruling triumvirate which expelled Stalin's chief rival, Leon Trotsky. (Eventually, Stalin would order the murders of his accomplices and Trotsky.) Stalin consolidated his position as master of the Kremlin and by 1932 the Soviet Union was in the grip of a reign of terror which would reach its peak in the great purges of 1934-1938. To the world, however, Stalin insisted that his rule was benign. In the early summer of 1932, interviewed by the German biographer Emil Ludwig, he denied that he was a dictator, denied that he reigned by fear, and declared that the "overwhelming majority" of the laboring population in the U.S.S.R. was behind him. Their support, he said, accounted for the "stability of Soviet power," not "any so-called policy of terrorism."

At that time no Russian translation of Mein Kampf existed, but in this exchange Stalin had instinctively followed a principle set down in Adolf Hitler's tenth chapter: "The great masses of the people...will more easily fall victim to a big lie [ein grosse Luge] than to a small one." Everything the Russian dictator had told Ludwig was the exact opposite of the truth. Soviet peasants were already in the toils of a misery far more wretched than anything known under the czars. Abandoning Lenin's managed economy, with its quasi-capitalistic incentives, Stalin had launched a series of five-year plans moving twenty-five million farmers from their lands into collectives. Troops and secret police rounded up protesters and murdered, exiled, or imprisoned them in an expanding net of concentration camps which systematically worked them to death. Nevertheless, collectivism failed. The Ukrainians were devastated by famine. Stalin rejected their appeal for help and actually exported grain while ten million of them starved to death.

At Chartwell, Winston was writing A.H. Richards, general secretary of the Anti-Nazi Council, "If, as I fear, the Government is going to let Czechoslovakia be cut to pieces, it seems to me that a period of very hard work lies before us all." Hard work lay ahead for Chamberlain, too. The betrayal of a nation requires just as much paperwork, conferring, and arguing over obscure points as its salvation. But the prime minister believed that he was the savior. He asked for, and was given, Hitler's promise that Germany would launch no attack until they had held a second summit sometime in the next few days. Departing Berchtesgaden, Chamberlain later Wrote Ida, he felt he had "established a certain confidence, which was my aim, and, on my side, in spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I though I saw in his face, I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word."

Prowling back and forth in his study--Muttering while Mrs. Hill's fingers flew over her typewriter--Churchill reworked the story of Philip II's Great Armada. Phillip II of Spain, envisaging his empire as the worldly arm of the Roman Catholic church, and himself as its sword, had plunged into all the religious wars of the time, guided by the faith that the Reformation could be undone and all Europe reunited in a single faith, regardless of the cost. Henry VIII had led England out of the church. Now his daughter Elizabeth was defending her father's Reformation. Philip, honing his blade, became obsessed with England, and when the northern Netherlands broke loose from Catholicism in 1581, he began building his "invincible Armada," over 132 vessels bearing 3165 cannon and 30,000 men, intent upon the conquest of Britain. Lord Leicester could muster but 20,000 untrained men. This force could not defend the beaches, and the fate of the island therefore rested with the fleet.

If the British prevailed, rule of the seas would pass from Spain to England. There, too, however, prospects seemed dim. Only 34 of the Queen's ships were seaworthy, all of them smaller than the enemy's galleons. They were joined by 36 privately owned vessels. It didn't seem enough. But the Royal Navvy was led by captains like John Hawkins and Francis Drake, the finest seamen the world had known. The size of their craft was misleading; based on his experience as a buccaneer in colonial waters, Hawkins had radically altered the design of English ships, cutting down the castles which had towered over the decks, mounting heavier, long-range guns, and deepening keels and concentrating on seaworthiness and speed.

Perhaps the island's greatest weapon, however, was its sovereign. Now in her mid-fifties, she had ruled England for thirty years, as long as Philip had Spain, and was as skilled in the use of power. She knew how to wear the crown, how to use it, and, in this hour of national peril, how to arouse her people in its defense. "The nation was united in the face of Spanish preparations," Churchill wrote. "While the Armada was still off England Queen Elizabeth reviewed the army at Tilbury and addressed them in these stirring words:

Let tyrants fear. I have always behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you, see, resolved, in the midst and heat of battle, to live or die amongst you, to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

Because their possessions were great, the appeasers had much to lose should the Red flag fly over Westminster. That was why they had felt threatened by the hunger riots of 1932. It was also the driving force behind their exorbitant fear and distrust of the new Russia. They had seen a strong Germany as a buffer against bolshevism, had thought their security would be strengthened if they sidled up to the fierce, virile Third Reich. Nazi coarseness, anti-Semitism, the Reich's darker underside, were rationalized; time, they assured one another, would blur the jagged edges of Nazi Germany. So, with their eyes open, they sought accommodation with a criminal regime, turned a blind eye to its iniquities, ignored its frequent resort to murder and torture, submitted to extortion, humiliation, and abuse until, having sold out all who had sought to stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and keep the bridge against the new barbarism, they led England herself into the cold damp shadow of the gallows, friendless save for the demoralized republic across the Channel.

Their end came when the House of Commons, in a revolt of conscience, wrenched power from them and summoned to the colors the one man who had foretold all that had passed, who had tried, year after year, alone and mocked, to prevent the war by urging the only policy which would have done the job. And now, in the desperate spring of 1940, with the reins of power at last firm in his grasp, he resolved to lead Britain and her fading empire in one last great struggle worthy of all they had been and meant, to arm the nation, not only with weapons, but also with the mace of honor, creating in every English breast a soul beneath the ribs of death.