Cliveden set

It was long accepted that the aristocratic Germanophile social network supported friendly relations with Nazi Germany and helped create the 1930s policy of appeasement.

[1] After the end of World War II in Europe, the discovery of the Nazis' Black Book in September 1945 showed that all the group's members were to be arrested as soon as Britain had been invaded by the Axis.

"[4] Christopher Sykes, in a sympathetic 1972 biography of Nancy Astor, argued that the entire story about the Cliveden Set had been an ideologically motivated fabrication by Cockburn that came to be generally accepted by the public, which was looking for scapegoats for the British prewar appeasement of Adolf Hitler.

While this is based on no direct historical counterpart, it does incorporate – among other events – elements of the visit to Nazi Germany in the late 1930s of the former British King Edward VIII after he had abdicated the throne in 1936 and settled into exile in France.

Lord Darlington, the fictional secondary protagonist in Nobel Prize-winning British author Sir Kazuo Ishiguro's 1989 novel The Remains of the Day is based on an amalgamation of several of the more prominent members of the Cliveden Set, some of whom are listed above.