After the conclusion of the Second World War it was often heard that international opinion had been all too slow to acknowledge, and contradict, the rise of National Socialism in Germany. That view, founded on an interpretation of the foreign policies of the democracies and caught up in a reaction against forms of ‘appeasement’, has proven hard to shake. Yet it was not true. The events of 1933 emerged within a broader understanding of international affairs which made them at once important, and the terms by which they were interpreted were already at large in the political imagination of British society. The world at large had become real in the imagination of the public. Germany was a country too close to British experience: what occurred there immediately raised a fear that peace might fail and a new war might break out. Doubts about the justice of the Treaty of Versailles had become almost conventional in many responsible quarters of British life. It was widely acknowledged that the new democracies of the post-war settlement were crumbling and leading to new, tyrannous movements. Democracy was under pressure. The creation, and endurance, of the Soviet Union had revealed that the world now faced a vast contest between the ideological politics of the anti-democratic Left and a burgeoning, anti-democratic Right. The word ‘totalitarianism’ had already become an element in political conversation and debate in continental Europe, and in Britain it was soon to spread.