Word: gottes
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This one sweeping condemnation contains all that is wrong with this book. The appeasers saw a good deal more than they are given credit for but they were limited in choosing from what they saw. Although Chamberlain and his advisers were obviously as "soft" toward Germany as Gilbert and Gott maintain, they also were a good deal more aware of Britain's situation than the authors...
According to their book jacket, Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott let "the facts tell the bitter and damnable truth" about the British appeasement of Hitler before World War II. The facts are the same old ones, but the authors dress them up more shockingly than ever. Their story is a disgusting one, a history of miscalculation and misdirection. But if the saga of Chamberlain and his cohorts is frightening, so is the shoddy reasoning and judgment of the authors...
...Gilbert and Gott, appeasement was the "sympathy of men in a slow, sluggish society for the dynamism of autocracy." The appeasers had one goal in mind--friendship with Germany--and they relentlessly pursued that goal despite all of Hitler's aggression. When Chamberlain became Prime Minister in 1937, he ignored the opponents of appeasement and sought the advice of its supporters. He surrounded himself with men like Sir Horace Wilson, "whose temporising, formula-evolving mind reinforced and emphasized the weakness of the Prime Minister...
...items as blankets and draperies than for men's suits and outerwear. Fulltime attendants (often required by local laws) sent up labor costs. Electric bills were high, and machines frequently proved unreliable. Clothes often came out smelling like sulphur. Many began to echo the wry dismay of Irwin Gott, a Houston jeweler-turned-drycleaner: "I didn't intend this to be a nonprofit corporation; it just turned out that...
...grew still wiser. It occurred to him that his speech still lacked color. How smashing it would be to spice it up with occasional quotations, foreign phrases, and literary allusions. When his parents observed that he had stopped going to church on Sundays he quipped, hardly to their amusement, "Gott ist tot, you know." When one of his roommates complained that Herbert badly needed a haircut, he answered gravely "De gustibus..." and left it to his listener to supply the ending. And when his other roommate asked to borrow ten dollars for a date, Herbert came back with "Neither...