I've been interested in the appeasement policy of the British right before WWII.  It should be worth some time, given what the wikipedia writers had to say about it:

The term is most often applied to the foreign policy of the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain towards Nazi Germany between 1937 and 1939. His policies of avoiding war with Germany have been the subject of intense debate for seventy years among academics, politicians and diplomats. The historians' assessments have ranged from condemnation for allowing Hitler to grow too strong, to the judgement that he had no alternative and acted in Britain's best interests. At the time, these concessions were widely seen as positive, and the Munich Pact among Germany, Britain, France and Italy prompted Chamberlain to announce that he had secured "peace for our time".^[3]

The onus, which I felt placed on me upon reading the bolded text, to get off my ass and start studying reminds me of something I read on Alain Badiou's wiki that got me interested (though for a short time) in starting to read his stuff:

Slavoj Žižek has written of Badiou that he is "a figure like Plato or Hegel walk[ing] here among us"

[Note: that quote was removed from his wiki site on 11 September 2012, commenting "(removing outrageous example of aggrandizement from lead)"]