Great Lives is a download from Radio 4.

We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.

He has been damned, scorned and derided.

Britain's bloodhound-faced mustachioed, wing-collared,

brolley-carrying prime minister is all but entrenched in popular legend

as the man who disastrously failed to stand up to Hitler in the run-up to war.

Can my guess this week do anything to rescue his reputation? The writer and

critic AA Gill has chosen as his great life Neville Chamberlain. Adrian you love playing Devil's Advocate.

You have all your life.

You've described me as a sort of

refrigerated fish, I think, in something you once wrote,

do you just like playing Devil's advocate or do you really think that this was a

great man who did the right thing by history?

There's two questions. One is yes I do think that he was I think he was a good man who did the right thing or tried to do the right thing

I don't think I'm I play devil's advocate I do I do like to question received

wisdoms and orthodoxies.

And I think that often you find that they are the received wisdom

because they suit somebody and they're orthodox is

because people don't question them anymore.

Up until the war I think he was a really fine reforming conservative politician.

And he was also a type of politician that I recognize and like.

Have you confronted the question that the kind of politician you, you like and

...