Robert Kee

Robert Kee is the author of thirteen books, including A Crowd is Not Company, an account of his time in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and his monumental history of Irish nationalism, The Green Flag, which is also published by Penguin in three separate volumes: The Most Distressful Country, The Bold Fenian Men, and Ourselves Alone. His highly acclaimed history of Charles Stewart Parnell and Irish Nationalism, The Laurel and the Ivy, is published by Penguin too. His other books include 1939: The World We Left Behind; 1945: The World We Fought For, and Munich: The Eleventh Hour, published in 1988 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Munich Agreement. His book, Trial and Error, about the Maguire Seven and Guildford Four cases, played a significant part in helping to right those miscarriages of justice.

He is also a freelance journalist and broadcaster, and has worked for many years on radio and television for both the BBC and ITV, making many documentaries, including a thirteen-part series based on The Green Flag for BBC television entitled Ireland: A History, which received great critical acclaim and was widely shown both here and in the United States. He began his journalistic career on Picture Post, became a special correspondent for the Sunday Times and the Observer, and was at one time literary editor of the Spectator.