Were we any better than the Nazis?

In July 1940, Hitler issued what Nicholson Baker calls ‘a final appeal to reason’. ‘The continuation of this war,’ he said in a speech, ‘will only end with the complete destruction of one of the two warring parties . . . I see no reason that should compel us to continue this war.’

‘It’s too tantalising, since there’s no shadow of a doubt we will reject any such suggestion,’ Frances Partridge wrote in her diary afterwards, adding the savagely deflating rider: ‘Now I suppose Churchill will again tell the world that we are going to die on the hills and on the seas, and then we shall proceed to do so.’

If this fascinating and upsetting book is the story of anything, it is above all the story of Winston Churchill telling the world that we are going to die on the hills and on the seas, and of people then doing so — and dying, too, in the forests and in the valleys, the ghettos and in the cities, in the air and in tunnels under the ground.