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| Getting Our Way by Christopher Meyer Oliver Miles enjoys a former diplomat's lively history of the professionThis is an entertaining book and also a valuable one. It consists of nine accounts of high and low points in British diplomacy, ranging from an English mission to hostile Scotland in the 16th century, via the Congress of Vienna, Macmillan and Kennedy at Nassau, and on to intervention in Bosnia. Some of them make sparkling reading; others, such as China in the 18th and 19th centuries, are brought to life by wonderful illustrations. Those famous Foreign Office drafting skills enable the author, himself a diplomat with a glittering career behind him, to get from Henry VIII to the Battle of Waterloo in a page and a half without losing his reader. Some of the accounts are conventional, some controversial – I don't think it is politically correct to give Castlereagh, Shelley's "cold adviser of yet colder kings", such an "outstanding" appraisal.Christopher Meyer links them together to illustrate a theory of diplomacy. Diplomacy is an essential part of the real world and has a task to do. In Britain there is a tendency to equate diplomacy with dressing up and living high, and the pursuit of British national interests with jingoism or even imperialism. Americans take it for granted that their diplomats are working against the national interest. Elsewhere diplomats are paid undue respect, as though what they were doing were part of some sacred rite.Meyer explains what a professional diplomat needs: insatiable curiosity about other countries, an abiding interest in foreign policy, willingness to spend half his working life outside the UK, and profound knowledge and understanding of some foreign countries. He must be able to negotiate, to win the confidence of the powerful and influence them, to understand what makes a foreign society tick, to analyse information and report it accurately and quickly, including what his own government does not want to hear; he needs, as Meyer says, "a quick mind, a hard head, a strong stomach, a warm smile and a cold eye". This will ring the bell for many old-timers such as me, who are dismayed by the meretricious images purveyed, for example, in the grisly FCO house magazine, "news+views" (note lower case, but alas no ee cummings here); just visit the Foreign Office website – how very little policy, how very much twitter. Meyer's summary of the qualities a diplomat requires is as good as any I have seen, though the standard authorities add others such as good looks and good horsemanship. I would add absolute integrity, not a quality conventionally associated with diplomats.Meyer defines the diplomat's task in the title of the book: Getting Our Way. There is, of course, nothing original in the message that diplomacy is about national interest, and he quotes with approval on the very first page of the introduction Palmerston's lapidary formulation of that principle, rightly repeating the traditional warning against going native. A diplomat has gone native when he puts the interests of the foreign country in which he works before those of his own.For my part I have become a heretic as I have thought about diplomacy since I retired from the service. My starting point was the discovery, when I was British ambassador in Greece, that the one person above all others who had the same agenda as I did was the Greek ambassador in London. Diplomacy, I conclude, is only occasionally about getting the best of the other fellow; it is usually about working with the other fellow to get the best for both of us. Meyer quotes an instance which undermines his "getting our way" theory: one of the advantages that Castlereagh enjoyed at the Congress of Vienna, and which enabled him to be a successful honest broker, was that Britain had no territorial claims of its own.Meyer writes well. He has the command of English to be expected from a former mandarin, but he has also made the difficult transition to writing for the general reader, and the book is not far short of a page-turner. He lets himself down from time to time by a rather artificial vulgarity, like a well-bred young subaltern desperate to speak the language of the barrack room. His "acknowledgments" let the cat out of the bag; the adulatory tributes paid to the luvvies of TV resemble the kowtow required by Chinese emperors and, as the book relates, refused by British diplomats. For this, we learn, is not a mere book, but the basis of a television series, oddly described on the dust cover as "first broadcast in 2010".The most prominent example of cultivated vulgarity is his account of the instructions given to him by Tony Blair's foreign policy adviser Jonathan Powell on appointment as ambassador in Washington: "We want you to get up the arse of the White House and stay there" – a striking phrase which does not admit of analysis, unless sofa government at No 10 embraced practices of which I would prefer to remain ignorant. Meyer used it as the first line of his earlier book of memoirs. Now, like the proverbial dog returning to its vomit, he quotes it again not once but twice. But the nadir for me was the throwaway comment, in an excellent if sexed-up description of the Congress of Vienna, that Beethoven was "the Andrew Lloyd Webber of the day". I'd like to think Lloyd Webber would find that as embarrassing as I do.Oliver Miles is a former British ambassador to Libya, Luxembourg and Greece.Oliver Milesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books of The Times: Bewitched by Bach, Bewildered by His Masterpiece Eric Siblin combines high and low musical forms, art and political histories and matters of arcane musicology into a single inquisitive volume. feeds.nytimes.com |
Books of the decade: Your best books of 2009 Wolf Hall made an impact commensurate with its vast size, but what were your highlights of the last year of the Noughties?Our usual exhortation in these books of the decade blogposts that you jog your memory by going to our special reports or the Wikipedia page for lists of books of the year should be unnecessary this time. Yes, we've finally reached the present – 2009 – and even if your memory is so bad that the past few months are but a haze, the current proliferation of year roundups in the supplements should do the trick. Rather than follow in those footsteps when you can read Justine Jordan on fiction, Sarah Crown on poetry or any number of log-rolling novelists, here's a quick roundup of the top fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children's reads, then over to you for your favourites of 2009. In fiction, Wolf Hall was the biggie of the year, in every sense. After almost universal adulation from critics, Hilary Mantel's 650-pager was favourite for the Booker from the off, and brought off the rare feat for a favourite of actually carrying off the prize. It could yet "do the double" and win the Costa. Some big names delivered the goods this year – Coetzee with Summertime, TóibÃn with Brooklyn and Atwood with The Year of the Flood – and short stories did well, with Petina Gappah taking the Guardian first book award. Sarah Waters's ghostly Little Stranger was a winner for me (though not as much as The Night Watch) while Audrey Niffenegger's eagerly awaited follow-up to The Time-Traveller's Wife, the ghostly Her Fearful Symmetry was a disappointment – curiously gripping for about three-quarters considering nothing much happens to the vaguely ludicrous characters, then gripping in the last quarter only because one wants to see if she can rescue the frankly ridiculous plot developments she suddenly introduces towards the end (she can't). Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows and David Vann's Legend of a Suicide were both mesmerisingly good. Non-fiction highlights were Chris Mullin's excellent political dairies, View from the Foothills, and the continuation of David Kynaston's fascinating social history, this time taking us through the 1950s with Family Britain. 2009 was arguably not a particularly strong year for biography but it did see John Carey's William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies kick up a minor storm with revelations about the novelist's teenage years. In poetry, Don Paterson's Rain was the standout volume while there were excellent offerings from Alice Oswald, Ruth Padel, Hugo Williams and Christopher Reid. Children's fiction had a good year. The second part of Patrick Ness's trilogy, which he began with the award-winning The Knife of Never Letting Go, continued strongly with The Ask and The Answer. Margo Lanagan's caused a stir with her marvellous and controversial (you have to love a book the Daily Mail describes as "sordid wretchedness") Tender Morsels. I also loved Charlie Higson's The Enemy, a zombie thriller with a refreshingly positive take on teenagers. And then there was Dan Brown and Twilight… Michelle Pauliguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Linklog: Ogden Nash, designer zombies, and more The mystery of free verse.• Ogden Nash in the New Yorker.• Readerly promiscuity.• How the zombie got her jaw.• Another angle on the novel and 9/11.Peter Robinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Ode on Melancholy | John Keats by John KeatsNo, no! go not to Lethe, neither twistWolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'dBy nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;Make not your rosary of yew-berries,Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth beYour mournful Psyche, nor the downy owlA partner in your sorrow's mysteries;For shade to shade will come too drowsily,And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.But when the melancholy fit shall fallSudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,And hides the green hill in an April shroud;Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,Or on the wealth of globed peonies;Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.She dwells with Beauty— Beauty that must die;And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lipsBidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:Ay, in the very temple of DelightVeil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongueCan burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,And be among her cloudy trophies hung.John KeatsPoetryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |