For most of 1992-1995, Britain stood aside while an internationally recognised state was attacked by externally-sponsored rebels bent on a campaign of territorial aggression and ethnic cleansing. It was her unfinest hour since 1938. Based on interviews with many of the chief participants, parliamentary debates, and a wide range of sources, Brendan Simm's brilliant study traces the roots of British policy and the highly sophisticated way in which the government sought to minimise the crisis and defuse popular and American pressure for action. We all continue to live with the results of these shameful actions to this day.

‘A scorching polemic … against British inaction in the face of Serb atrocities … quite rightly minces no words and takes no prisoners’
Cal McCrystal, Financial Times

‘Outstandingly good … liberating and exhilarating … A powerful exposition of just how disastrously Whitehall got it wrong … Every Foreign Office official, every MP and every pundit should be obliged to read it’
Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph

‘Britain’s refusal to act in the former Yugoslavia left the Serbs free to butcher thousands of Bosnians … Simms’s attention to telling detail and cool, literate anger make Unfinest Hour the best epitaph for the wretched years of the Major administration I’ve read to date’
Nick Cohen, Observer

‘This is a book about how the British establishment grovelled before Serbia’s murderous dictator Slobodan Milosevic … Talk about a low, dishonest decade! Reading it made me want to throw my passport on the nearest rubbish heap, so total is the indictment of … the British state’
Marcus Tanner, Independent

‘The best sort of polemical book: hard-hitting, well researched and stimulating, with a preference for analysis over sensation’
Alan Judd, Sunday Times