It is anniversary season again. From Munich, through 1939 and on to Pearl Harbor we can expect the seventy years since the war to provoke the same crop of reassessments and recapitulations that came at fifty and sixty. But can it really be necessary to have yet another book on the Munich crisis? On the evidence of this latest addition to the genre, the answer is probably no.

To be fair to David Faber, he tells a lively story, fleshed out with a lot of informative, sometimes amusing, detail – what is politely called today ‘thick narrative’. The prologue on Heston – the now extinct airport near what later became the sprawling air metropolis of Heathrow – is