[4] Henderson's obsession with his wardrobe, social etiquette, and hunting was part of a carefully cultivated image that he sought for himself as a polished Edwardian gentleman.

[8] As would be the case during his time in Berlin, Henderson took exception to any negative remark in the British press about Yugoslavia and wrote to the Foreign Office to ask if anything could be done to silence such criticism.

In January 1935, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Robert "Van" Vansittart sharply rebuked him for a letter he had written to Paul in which Henderson strongly supported Yugoslavia's complaints against Italy.

Harold Macmillan wrote of Eden's choice in his 1966 memoirs: Why he did so is difficult to understand.... Henderson proved a complete disaster; hysterical, self-opinionated and unreliable.

[11] As he crossed the Atlantic on a ship to take him back to Britain, Henderson read Mein Kampf in the original German version to acquaint himself with the thinking of Adolf Hitler.

[13] Henderson wrote in his 1940 The Failure of a Mission that he was determined "to see the good side of the Nazi regime as well as the bad, and to explain as objectively as I could its aspirations and viewpoint to His Majesty's Government".

[14] Upon arriving in London, Henderson met the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, who was due to replace Stanley Baldwin as prime minister the next month, for a briefing about the Berlin mission.

[13] Henderson was to say that Chamberlain had authorised him to commit "calculated indiscretions" in the pursuit of peace, but the German-born American historian Abraham Ascher wrote that no evidence has emerged to support that claim.

Ascher cited Henderson's dispatch to Eden on 26 January 1938 that warned that another Anglo-German war "would be ... absolutely disastrous – I cannot imagine and would be unwilling to survive the defeat of the British Empire.

[20] In one of his "calculated indiscretions", Henderson broke with the unwritten rule in the Foreign Office that ambassadors should never criticise their predecessors by telling Göring that Sir Eric Phipps had been too insensitive towards German concerns.

[23] Henderson regarded all aims of the "moderates", such as the return of the Free City of Danzig, the Polish Corridor, Upper Silesia, the lost colonies in Africa, the Anschluss with Austria and the Sudetenland joining Germany as being reasonable and just.

[18] Vansittart wrote to Henderson that he should not attend the Nuremberg Rally since "you would be suspected of giving countenance or indeed eulogy (as alleged by one Member of Parliament) to the Nazi system", and the Foreign Office would be accused of having "fascist leanings".

[24] Henderson wrote that his hosts in Nuremberg went out of their way to be friendly towards him by giving him a luxurious apartment to stay in and inviting him to sumptuous meals with the best German food and wine being served.

[27] On 16 March 1938, Henderson wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, to set out his view: "British interests and the standard of morality can only be combined if we insist upon the fullest possible equality for the Sudeten minority of Czechoslovakia".

[33] Attolico, Weizsäcker, Henderson and François-Poncet would meet in secret to discuss in French to share information and to devise strategies to stop a war in 1938.

[35] In September 1938, Henderson, along with Halifax and Sir Horace Wilson, the Chief Industrial Adviser to the government, were the only ones aware of Chamberlain's Plan Z to have the Prime Minister fly to Germany to meet Hitler personally and to find out just exactly it was that he wanted with the Sudetenland.

[36] Despite Henderson's belief that Hitler might have actually gone mad, he still found much to admire about him and wrote that he had "sublime faith in his own mission and that of Germany in the world" and "he is a constructive genius, a builder and no mere demagogue".

[37] Sir Oliver Harvey, Halifax's Principal Private Secretary, wrote in September 1938, "Nevile Henderson's very presence here is a danger as he infects the Cabinet with his gibber".

[19] From October 1938 to February 1939, the British Embassy in Berlin was run by the chargé d'affaires, Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, a member of the Scottish gentry and a protégé of Vansittart.

[19] The dispatches from Berlin changed markedly as Ogilvie-Forbes stated his belief that Hitler's aims went beyond revising the Treaty of Versailles towards winning Germany "world power status".

[42] Henderson praised Hitler for his "sentimentality" and wrote "the humiliation of the Czechs [at the Munich conference] was a tragedy", but it was Beneš's own fault for failing to give autonomy to the Sudeten Germans while he still had the chance.

[43] After Wehrmacht troops on 15 to 16 March 1939 occupied the remaining territory of Czechoslovakia in defiance of the Munich Agreement, Chamberlain spoke of a betrayal of confidence and decided to resist German aggression.

Henderson wrote, "Nazism has crossed the Rubicon of the purity of race" by creating the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia and that the seizure of the "Czech lands" of Bohemia and Moravia "cannot be justified on any grounds".

[45] On 29 April 1939, the French ambassador in Berlin, Robert Coulondre, reported to Paris that when Germany occupied the Czech half of Czecho-Slovakia on 15 March 1939, that Henderson, "always an admirer of the National Socialist regime, careful to protect Mr. Hitler's prestige, was convinced that Great Britain and Germany could divide the world between them" but was very angry when he learned that the Reich had just violated the Munich Agreement, as it "wounded him in his pride".

"[48] Henderson felt that the Versailles Treaty had been unjust towards Germany by creating the Free City of Danzig and giving the Polish Corridor and part of Silesia to Poland, and his preferred solution to the crisis would be Britain to pressure the Poles into concessions.

The American historian Gerhard Weinberg described the scene: "When Ribbentrop refused to give a copy of the German demands to the British Ambassador at midnight of 30–31 August 1939, the two almost came to blows.

Ambassador Henderson, who had long advocated concessions to Germany, recognised that here was a deliberately conceived alibi the German government had prepared for a war it was determined to start.

Henderson wrote in his memoirs how eager Prince Paul of Yugoslavia had been to illustrate his military plans to counter Mussolini's projected assault on Dalmatia when the main body of the Italian Royal Army had been sent overseas.

In his memoir, Henderson stated: Atatürk (Mustafa Kemal) built a new Turkey on the ruins of the old; and his expulsion of the Greeks, which perhaps suggested to Hitler that he should do the same in Germany with the Jews, has already been forgotten and forgiven.

Its final chapter defends his work in Berlin and the policy of "appeasement," praises Chamberlain for being "an honest and brave man" and argues on behalf of the Munich Agreement on the grounds that Britain was too weak militarily in 1938 to have stood up to Hitler.