Little Dog

• Munich: The Eleventh Hour by Robert Kee
  Hamish Hamilton, 242 pp, £14.95, September 1988, ISBN 0 241 12537 5
• Peace for Our Time by Robert Rothschild
  Brassey, 366 pp, £16.95, September 1988, ISBN 0 08 036264 8
• A Class Divided: Appeasement and the Road to Munich 1938 by Robert Shepherd
  Macmillan, 323 pp, £16.95, September 1998, ISBN 0 333 46080 4

Last year was the year of commemorative news. The media discovered that the public was old enough to be as interested in events from fifty years ago as it is in today’s news. Of these events the one that took up the most time and space was the Munich agreement of 1938, although it was subsequently driven off the centre pages by Kristallnacht and the Jewish pogroms in Germany. Robert Kee’s book has its origins in his commemorative TV documentary and the book by Robert Shepherd, producer of Channel 4’s A Week in Politics, reads like the script of another documentary. Robert Rothschild was a young Belgian diplomat at the time, far from the centre of things, so his book too is essentially an image of Munich as seen through the media.