Anthony Eden

Drawing on a mass of unpublished archival material, much of it from Anthony Eden's own papers, David Dutton seeks to reassess the career of a man who experienced the extremes of political fortune. For much of his life the golden boy of British politics with a popular appeal that transcended party boundaries, Eden left public life with his reputation for sound judgement and probity sadly tarnished. The Suez crisis of 1956, which did such lasting damage to Eden's historical reputation, is closely examined but is not allowed to compromise a proper assessment of a man who was at the heart of British political life for more than two decades. Eden's role in some of the key episodes in modern history is searchingly probed: his participation in the appeasement of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy until 1938, when he resigned from Chamberlain's government; his direction in conjunction with Churchill of Britain's wartime diplomacy; his involvement as a key player in the Cold War, in European integration and in postwar domestic policy; and his instigation of the events that culminated in the Suez debacle and his own downfall. Anthony Eden was not an easy man to know, but David Dutton's interpretation of his career transcends the partisanship of writings by his contemporaries or near-contemporaries. He emerges neither as the 'golden boy' of myth nor as a man largely bereft of substance but as a diplomat of high standing, if a dangerously thin-skinned and sometimes inept politician.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.