the lacklustre leadership of exceedingly sane men as Neville Chamberlain,
Chamberlain was the one who was "nuts". Or at least blind.
No. Chamberlain was sane, according to the author. Logically or sanely, Hitler should have stuck by the deal. He could he incrementally done what he wanted to do. Instead, Hitler, a mentally unbalanced person wanted all now (a two front war with Russia in the winter?). Essentially, you had a relatively sane person believing he could come to an arrangement with an insane person. Churchill recognized you could not reason with nut jobs. Churchill saw this with the Muslim nations as well. The author contends that Churchill’s pathologies made him well suited in that particular instance in history to address the issue of Hitler.