44 Days in Prague: The Runciman Mission and the Race to Save Europe

“The Runciman Mission has all but disappeared in today’s narrative of the pre-WW2 crisis. Ann Shukman has rescued it from obscurity with her skillfully woven account. No one writing on the Munich Conference can now ignore its prelude or the man at its center, fated to fail.” — Richard Overy, author of Blood and Ruins and The Bombing War

“44 Days in Prague charts the history, ambitions and ultimate failure of the Runciman Mission to Czechoslovakia in the late summer of 1938, skillfully weaving social and cultural threads into a story of high politics. A remarkable achievement.” — David Dutton, Ramsay Muir Emeritus Professor of Twentieth Century British Political History, University of Liverpool

“Based on family papers, new documents from the Czech archives and interviews with descendants of those who met members of the Runciman Mission in Czechoslovakia, Shukman brings this story to life and offers a delightfully vivid personal aspect. A most interesting and enjoyable book.” — Catherine Andreyev, Emeritus Professor, University of Oxford, and author of Russia Abroad: Prague and the Russian Diaspora

“Shukman’s timely and instructive chronicle of the doomed 44-day Runciman peace mission to Czechoslovakia in August-September 1938 unsparingly exposes the ignorance, prejudices, and gullibility of key British actors, including her own relatives, in their dealings with the Czechoslovak parties. Eye-opening.” — Ruth Coates, Department of Russian, University of Bristol

“With exemplary clarity, Ann Shukman, drawing on her own archive, recounts the mission’s progress week by week. It was lavishly entertained, and met everyone–save the real puppet-master, Hitler. Runciman’s final despairing cry was “They lied to me!” A remarkable book.” — Robin Milner-Gulland, Emeritus Professor of Russian, University of Sussex

“An engrossing blow-by-blow account of a fateful mission. The author draws brilliantly on family material to bring alive a now-lost inter-war world of high society and high diplomacy.” — Brendan Simms, author of Hitler: A Global Biography

“The melancholy Runciman mission, the last attempt to discover some arrangement whereby Germans and Czechs could live more or less contentedly together in Bohemia, receives here a long-overdue appraisal. Ann Shukmann combines a keen critical mind with a mastery of the available sources.” — Richard Bassett, author of Hitler’s Spy Chief and Last Days in Old Europe

“Shukman’s study is… very pacey and engaging, breaking new ground in several ways. It sets out nicely the hybrid nature of the SdP.” — Literary Review

“A blow-by-blow account. … Meticulously researched, a feat of synthesis in which each stage of Runciman’s mission is rendered in… detail.” — Times Literary Supplement

“Ann Shukman has produced a vivid and scrupulously fair investigation into her grandfather Walter Runciman’s role in the doomed pre-war mission to broker a peace deal between the Czechoslovak Republic and its Sudeten German minority.” — The House Magazine

“44 Days in Prague is a blow-by-blow account of the mission, with the most interesting parts being the Runcimans’ activities outside the city. Nevertheless, the book is an enjoyable read. It conveys a fuller picture of the world of privilege in which policy was made than can be found in books based only on official documents.” — G. C. Peden, Journal of Modern History

The dramatic story of a last-ditch attempt to avert catastrophe in Europe, on the eve of the Second World War.