Book description
Anthony Eden, who served as both Foreign Secretary and Prime
Minister, was one of the central political figures of the twentieth
century. He had good looks, charm, a Military Cross from the Great
War, an Oxford first and a secure parliamentary constituency from his
mid-twenties. He was Foreign Secretary at the age of 38, and the first
British statesman to meet Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. Eden's
dramatic resignation from Neville Chamberlain's Cabinet in 1938,
outlined here in the fullest detail yet, made an international impact.
This ground-breaking book examines his controversial life and tells
the inside story of the Munich crisis (1938), the Geneva Conference
(1954), Eden's battles with Churchill over the modernisation of the
post-war Conservative Party and his rivalry with Butler and Macmillan
in the early 1950s, culminating in a fascinating analysis of the Suez crisis.
D. R. Thorpe is a senior member of Brasenose College, Oxford. He has
written widely on twentieth-century British political history, and was
invited to undertake this biography by the Countess of Avon, Eden's
widow, who has made important new material available to him.
