Book review: The Postwar Legacy of Appeasement: British Foreign Policy since 1945. By R. Gerald Hughes (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. xii +331pp, AU$40.99 (pb).

“Appeaser”; since the Second World War there is perhaps no other label that prime ministers and presidents in the English-speaking world have strived so hard to avoid. It is extraordinary how powerful and long-lasting the term appeasement, the name Neville Chamberlain and the place Munich have been in the discourse of post-war international relations. It is a reflection of the all-powerful historical legacy of the Second World War that these terms still resonate with policy makers and their publics well into the twenty-first century. Such a phenomenon deserves scholarly attention and R. Gerald Hughes has done justice to this topic in his very fine book The Postwar Legacy of Appeasement: British Foreign Policy Since 1945.