Evaluation
The speed with which Guilty Men was written shows in its errors. For example, the authors muddled the place and date where Baldwin said that re-armament was unpopular with the voters. (They placed it in the Fulham East by-election, 1933, instead of the 1935 general election and dated the Fulham by-election 1935. "1935" was corrected to "1933" in later editions, but the 1998 Penguin facsimile edition reproduced the error without comment.) It also shows in its excessively detailed description of Dunkirk.
The book's arguments and conclusions have been questioned by politicians and historians. In 1945, Quintin Hogg, MP wrote The Left was never Right, which was critical of Guilty Men and argued that "unpreparedness before the war was largely the consequence of the policies of the parties of the Left." The idea of appeasement as error and cowardice was challenged in 1960 by historian A. J. P. Taylor's highly controversial "The Origins of The Second World War", in which he argued that, in the circumstances, it might be seen as a rational policy.
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“Evaluation is creation: hear it, you creators! Evaluating is itself the most valuable treasure of all that we value. It is only through evaluation that value exists: and without evaluation the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear it, you creators!”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)