The West Wing

Top tosh: The Diplomat reviewed

The Diplomat bears the same relationship to 21st-century ambassadorial geopolitics as Bridgerton does to the salons and social mores of early 19th-century England. The latter is Jane Austen as reimagined by a wannabe Jilly Cooper with a first-class degree in historical revisionism; the former is a bit like what The West Wing might have been if it had been written by Dan Brown and those behind the classic, early 1980s husband-and-wife mystery drama Hart to Hart. But I’m not sure this is necessarily a bad thing. A lot of chattering-class types have been glued to The Diplomat since the first season when it started last year and have been recommending it as one of those series you just have to watch.

Climbing the walls

From our US edition

Colombo In January, I promised a visiting Army reservist friend that we’d climb Adam’s Peak. That plan was scotched when I came down with dengue fever. But I’d climbed Adam’s Peak before (the first time, Christmas 2004, when the tsunami struck, probably saved my life) and there would always be another chance to do it, right? Things change. Like everyone else in town, I was already bored and irritable from the first week of our lockdown when I saw a burst of British news items on COVID-19 nixing Everest expeditions, pensioners trying to keep fit indoors and some chap figuring out how many stairs it took to ‘top’ the mountains of the British Isles. Challenge accepted.

climbing