Diplomacy

Every so often one reads in the Times or the Daily Telegraph an obituary of an old warrior that simply leaps from the page. A heroic rescue mission in the second world war, an escape by tunnelling, Burma, Kenya, Aden, a secret journey to Lhasa disguised as a yak-herder, and that’s just the military stuff. Then there’s the extra-curricular life — the gliding accident, the false start as a trapeze artist at 17, chairmanship of the Benevolent Fund for Abandoned Zoo Animals, the notorious fling with the Foreign Secretary’s wife, the deep love of Shelley, the book on Indian Railways and the passion for rare cyclamen. Crikey, you think, let’s hope he at least makes it into the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. But if this fellow could write, what a memoir!

Senior civil servants are generally expected to be shadowy figures, influential rather than powerful, discreet rather than flamboyant, probably — in Gladwyn’s generation at any rate — educated at Winchester. To describe such a being as a Titan might seem an oxymoron. The Titans, it will be remembered, were a family of giants who had the temerity to challenge Zeus and duly got their comeuppance. In this well-researched and thoughtful book Sean Greenwood convinces one that in the case of Lord Gladwyn — not least in the ill-judged challenge to the superiority of Zeus — this far-fetched analogy is amply justified.