Diplomacy
From ugly duckling into swan – the remarkable transformation of Pamela Digby
The plump teenager who married Randolph Churchill soon turned herself into a ravishing beauty – to become the 20th century’s most influential seductress
Distrust and resentment have plagued Anglo-Russian relations for centuries
On a visit to England in 1556, Ivan the Terrible’s envoy alienated Londoners with his extreme suspicions – and lurid insults have been exchanged ever since
Unmasking 'panda diplomacy'
The star of the Beijing Winter Olympics wasn’t an athlete: it was Bing Dwen Dwen, the spacesuit-clad panda mascot. It…
Putin may yet resist a full-on invasion
The west is still in the dark on what Vladimir Putin will do next. The Russian military build-up on the…
Wrapped up in satire, a serious lesson about the fine line between success and scandal
Have you heard of champing? Neither had I. Turns out it’s camping in a field beside a deserted church. When…
Alan Duncan rants about ‘idiot’ parliamentary colleagues and Britain’s waning influence
As a budding political apparatchik, my first job out of university was as a junior parliamentary assistant to Alan Duncan…
The Kremlin's strategy to undermine Britain
The past week has seen the war in Ukraine, which has been simmering for the last seven years, once more…
War was never Sir Edward Grey’s métier
This meaty but easily digested biography pivots around the events either side of that fateful evening of 4 August 1914…
The art of negotiation: Peace Talks, by Tim Finch, reviewed
Early on in Tim Finch’s hypnotic novel Peace Talks, the narrator — the diplomat Edvard Behrends, who facilitates international peace…
It’s judo, not chess, that’s Putin’s game
These two refreshingly concise books address the same question from different angles: how should we deal with Russia? Mark Galeotti…
Mission statement: the importance of a fine British embassy
At first blush this looks like one of those run-of-the-mill coffee-table books published just for the Christmas market — expensively…
Laurence Oliphant: oddest of Victorian oddballs
As an erstwhile obituarist, I pity the poor hack who had to write up the life of Laurence Oliphant —…
The four men who averted the Apocalypse
Robert Service’s account of the greatest turning point in modern history is unlikely to be bettered, says Sherard Cowper-Coles
Charles Moore’s Notes: Who’d be a diplomat now?
The other day, a friend told me, he had been chatting to an old friend of his who has spent…
Niall Ferguson's biography of Henry Kissinger is a masterpiece
I have met Dr Kissinger, properly, only three times. First, in Cairo, in 1980, when, as a junior diplomat escorting…
Spectator letters: Cutting the Lords, and a defence of Edwin Lutyens
Trimming the ermine Sir: I am a new boy in the House of Lords compared with Viscount Astor — though…
John Freeman: polymath or psychopath?
They don’t make Englishmen like the aptly named John Freeman any more. When he died last Christmas just shy of…
All might have been well had Nicholas II only listened to a tiny cosmopolitan elite
The veteran Russian historian Dominic Lieven’s new study of Russia’s descent towards the first world war is deeply researched, highly…
The enlightened king of Iraq
Alan Rush admires the humane, enlightened Faisal I, who fought with T.E. Lawrence and devoted his life to Arab rights, independence and unity
A Strong Song Tows Us, by Richard Burton - review
How minor is minor? ‘Rings a bell’ was more or less the response of two English literature graduates, now successful…
Does the EU really need 32 diplomats in Mozambique? And 44 in Barbados?
The Prime Minister recently professed himself shocked at waste in the European Union. In particular, he was incensed by an…
