A small, but determined, underground organisation foments direct action, strikes and civil protest. British Jews face the possibility they will soon be sent to the ‘camps’ to share the fate of millions of their continental brethren.īritish resistance, under Churchill and the Labour leaders Clem Atlee and Nye Bevan, is growing. Opportunist newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook and his fascist Home Secretary Oswald Moseley run this puppet state, the media is strictly controlled and the streets are patrolled by violent auxiliary police. Britain has become an authoritarian state, increasingly collaborating with the Nazis, with a handful of shadowy German SS ‘advisers’ its de facto government and with army units in occupation. This ‘what might have been’ story is set in 1952, 12 years after the appeasers under Lord Halifax agreed a treaty with Germany. Part of the contention is caused by his use of real figures – and individuals will have differing views on how those people might have behaved.
Sansom’s ideas about how history might have changed won’t be to everyone’s taste. This is his alternative version of what might have happened had Winston Churchill not gained power from the inadequate Chamberlain at a crucial moment in world history and this thought-provoking book requires the reader to accept that gloomy basic concept. This is not the exquisitely-crafted Tudor murder mystery we have come to expect from C J Sansom.
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