The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. A pacifist Welsh historian, a Great War flying ace, a butterfly-collecting businessman… Coffee With Hitler offers a rare glimpse into a motley crew who would provide the British government with better intelligence on the horrifying rise of the Nazis than anyone else. Drawing on newly discovered primary sources, Charles Spencer sheds light on the early career of Kim Philby, Winston Churchill's approach to appeasement, the US entry into the war and the Rudolf Hess affair, in a groundbreaking reassessment of Britain's relationship with Nazi Germany. Charles Spicer has achieved something rare, a book that is entertaining and informative whilst also being an important piece of scholarship.

They consisted of “a leftwing, pacifist Welsh political secretary, a conservative, butterfly-collecting Old Etonian businessman and a pioneering Great War fighter ace”. Coffee with Hitler should make it impossible to continue to lampoon the Fellowship as an unsavoury gang.

One, this is a segment of a much larger story and there are elements about which we still know little and, perhaps, that will always be the case about such a controversial area of British History. Coffee with Hitler tells the astounding and poignant story, for the first time, of a handful of amateur British intelligence agents who wined, dined and befriended the leading National Socialists between the wars.

How wonderful, for instance, that when Sir Anthony Eden finally met Hitler (for one of the many coffees the book describes) his main observation concerned the quality of Hitler's tailoring. I could not recommend this book enough - not least because it reveals just how nuanced the whole subject of appeasement had become by1939. The last two paragraphs of the book beautifully summarise the lessons we need to learn to navigate our current and future relationships with dictators and autocracies. History has overlooked the three amateurs who, despite their heroic efforts and best intentions, could not stop the descent into hell of the National Socialists. It is also not entirely clear what their own agenda really was - where they willing to give Germany a free hand in eastern Europe, where they anti-communists or did they want a milder form of Nazism with which they could along with.A pacifist Welsh historian, a Great War flying ace, and a butterfly-collecting businessman offered the British government better intelligence on the horrifying rise of the Nazis than anyone else. The extraordinary story of three men, a Welsh historian and political secretary, a butterfly-collecting Old Etonian and a Great War fighter ace. This tale of the role of the (little known) Anglo-German Fellowship during Britain's slow descent into war as the 1930's progressed, is quite simply fascinating. The second point is that the notes to the book are totally inadequate whether this is the author's fault or the publisher wishing to save space is not clear.

David Lloyd George (right, with Winston Churchill in 1922) became a key figure in the Anglo-German Fellowship. The cleverly worked friendships with Ribbentrop, Goring and Goebbels, are explained in precise and reliable detail, that form the platform for approach to HItler himself. This was accentuated by the accession of Edward VIII, a man who was described approvingly by Ribbentrop as “a kind of English National Socialist”. The process starts in June 1934 with efforts continuing right-up to the outbreak of the second world war in September 1939; with the addition of a further crucial commentary on the period from September 1939 through to May 1941. Above all else, the vignettes and anecdotes make the key characters so real that it's like being there with them.Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny 'Charles Spicer tells the chilling story of how otherwise respectable men and women became pawns in a game of international intrigue with a reprehensible regime. Spicer describes his intentions in writing Coffee With Hitler as being explicitly about those who sought to “civilise” rather than “appease” the Nazis. Julie Gottlieb, professor of modern history, University of Sheffield 'A captivating and convincing revisionist history.