These two books by Robert Harris, one of the masters of historical fiction, are not a series or even officially linked, but I read them within a few weeks of each other and it makes sense to discuss them together. Precipice is about the weeks leading up to the outbreak of WW1, focusing mainly on UK Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and his relationship with his muse/mistress/hard to say what exactly she was, the much much younger Venetia Stanley. Munich is about events leading up to the outbreak of WW2, specifically the infamous Munich Conference at which Britain, France, and Italy agreed to allow Germany to annex the Sudetenland, without inviting Czechoslovakia to the conference. This novel focuses primarily on two fictional characters, an English civil servant and a German one, who were close friends in university years and now meet again at this tense moment of international intrigue.

There’s a lot to dig into with both these novels, and I really enjoyed both of them, but the big takeaway is that I came away with a lot more respect for Neville Chamberlain (at least, as he is portrayed in this admittedly fictional, but well-informed, depiction), who is generally associated with weakness, appeasement, and generally Letting Hitler Get Away With Things. As for WW1-era Asquith, I didn’t know enough about him before this to have an opinion, but whatever opinion I might have had would certainly have gone down after reading about how this middle-aged man behaved like a lovesick teenager over a woman young enough to be his daughter, to the point of regularly compromising national security by revealing state secrets in his letters to her.