The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

I hadn’t planned to post another work of fiction quite so soon, but this book jumped the queue on me. Mainly because I finished it in about two hours on a rainy day’s commute, and it made for a fast review.

The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

In mid-1914, the London newspapers are full of ominous reports from the Continent, but Richard Hannay’s uneasiness has little to do with the problems of world affairs. Having made a small fortune in the mines of Rhodesia, he has come to London to see the ‘Old Country’ but finds himself more bored and restless as the days past. Finally, he resolves that he will give London one more day, but if nothing interesting happens to keep him in England then he will leave on the next boat for South Africa. As fortune would have it, upon returning to his flat that night Hannay runs into his upstairs neighbour, an American by the name of Franklin Scudder. Scudder seems badly shaken, and after Hannay gives him a drink to steady his nerves he reveals that he has just had to fake his own death in the flat upstairs — he is being pursued by a very dangerous anarchist group whose plans he has stumbled upon, and the little he reveals to Hannay indicates that this group intends to assassinate a high-ranking Greek politician and spark a massive war that will soon engulf all of Europe. Hannay, more intrigued by the American’s wild story than he initially lets on, agrees to let Scudder hide in his flat for the time being. But when he returns home a few days later and finds Scudder stabbed to death on the floor of his living room, he realises that he is now the anarchists’ next target. Hannay flees London, barely one step ahead of both the police and the anarchists, and sets off on a mission to prevent the assassination from taking place. Yet as he leads his pursuers on a grand chase across England and Scotland, the true nature of the plot becomes more and more clear to him…and, far from completing his mission, he soon finds that it will take all of his wits just to stay alive.

Every fiction genre has to start somewhere, and The Thirty-Nine Steps was one of the first modern adventure-espionage novels, the canonical ancestor of most anything written by Ian Fleming, Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, Dan Brown, and others of their ilk. Modern readers with seemingly more sophisticated literary tastes may find Buchan’s plot conventions to be a little on the thin side, yet compared to some of the abovementioned authors, Buchan’s story is an utter paragon of brevity and fast pacing, with a constantly moving plot and not a shred of unnecessary information. Knowing readers may smirk a bit at how Richard Hannay seems to have just the appropriate combination of personality traits, skills, and knowledge to make him successful in his mission — from a knack for decoding secret messages to an awareness of how to set off dynamite — but again, the means by which Buchan works these character traits into the plot requires far less suspension of disbelief to keep reading than is required by some of the abovementioned authors. What matters most of all is the central theme: that Richard Hannay is a resourceful, clear-headed, extraordinary-ordinary man who alone can stand up to the faceless and unseen enemies and do what those in government and other positions of authority cannot.

When looking at early examples of a particular genre, it is worth noting the story aspects that would later become conventions — and in this case, one aspect that might be easily overlooked is the use of technology as a weapon against which the lone hero must strive. On multiple occasions, Hannay’s pursuers use an airplane (or rather, aeroplane) to hunt for him, and it’s worth considering just how new and thrilling this would have seemed to a reader who picked up a copy of this book in 1915. Airplanes had been invented scarcely more than a decade before the events of the novel, and were a very experimental form of combat even towards the end of World War I; this was advanced technology in Buchan’s day, as advanced as rockets and lasers and satellites and computers would be for the action heroes of a later era. As a forerunner of its kind, The Thirty-Nine Steps sets a particularly high standard to follow, one that has been imitated with varying degrees of success over the years. And though Buchan would later write further accounts of the increasingly fantastic exploits of Richard Hannay, this novel stands by itself as a classic thriller tale of pre-war intrigue.

The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945 by Peter Hennessy

Catching up after a few days of missed postings — I may end up switching over to a Tuesday/Sunday posting schedule after this week, just to spread out the backlog a bit.

I thought I’d posted this one already, but a look through my tags suggests that I haven’t. I’ve another Hennessy book coming up for review soon after this one, most likely on Sunday.

The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945 by Peter Hennessy

Like much of the British political system, the office of the Prime Minister (and First Lord of the Treasury) of Great Britain has been sort of cobbled together over the centuries into the form that exists today. As such, there’s an intriguing amount of flexibility in its job scope and job description that quite a lot of people don’t often notice. For instance, a prime minister doesn’t necessarily have to be the leader of the largest political party in the House of Commons — in 1940, Neville Chamberlain stayed on as leader of the Conservative Party for a few months after Winston Churchill officially became PM. A study of the office of Prime Minister in the years since World War II has to look at a subject that is deceptively complex to contemplate, all the more so because each successive PM has added his or her own interpretation of the duties and responsibilities (and perks) that come with being at the top of the greasy pole. In The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945, Peter Hennessy has written a neat and very compact analysis that incorporates insight and input from a wide range of senior officials, politicians, and media people, all of whom provide a running commentary on the changes that have taken place over the years.

Interestingly, Hennessy seems to take it as a mission to ‘redeem’ premiers that perhaps haven’t been given the credit they deserve for their achievements in their time in office. He has quite a few kind words for Clement Attlee’s seemingly unflappable outlook on governing, Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s sense of duty and determination, Edward Heath’s successful European entry negotiations, and Jim Callaghan’s deep roots in the labour movement. But he’s not above castigating a prime minister for serious flaws or failings — he points out Anthony Eden’s near-monomaniacal hatred of General Nasser and Harold Wilson’s slapdash attempts to control inter-Cabinet squabbles as special examples of leadership problems. Even Winston Churchill is dismissed as having been too old and too steeped in wartime tradition to think that he could manage Britain at peace (leaving Korea and Indochina aside for the moment, that is). As for what he has to say about Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair…well, let’s just say that he thinks their approaches to Cabinet government leave much to be desired.

As a study of the premiership and as a person-by-person analysis of those who have held the office of First Lord of the Treasury since 1945, I can only say that this book is invaluable. Even if it’s occasionally a little frustrating to look at the footnotes and see ‘Private information’ as the source for a really insightful comment or quotation, it’s rather difficult to fault the breadth, depth, or quality of Hennessy’s research on this topic.

Democracy by Michael Frayn

This particular review is going to be more of a review of the play than of the playscript itself, but since I don’t normally buy playscripts, the fact that I’ve bought the latter is a sign of how much I would encourage anyone to see the former. (I’ve seen the play three times, twice in London and once in a touring company.) It’s one of those shows that I’ve a feeling I’ll try to see no matter when and where it’s being performed.

Democracy by Michael Frayn

Democracy is historical fiction…or rather, fictionalised history. It’s the story of Günter Guillaume, the East German spy who infiltrated the office of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Guillaume and his wife Christel, both officers of the Stasi, ‘escaped’ from East Germany in the early 1950s and spent several years building a cover for themselves as members of the SPD, the left-of-centre social democratic party in West Germany. Willy Brandt, formerly the mayor of West Berlin, became the first socialist Chancellor of Germany (since the 1930s) in October 1969. And by a stroke of good fortune (for the Stasi, at least), Guillaume gained a position in Brandt’s office shortly afterwards — and he eventually became Brandt’s personal assistant, with the kind of access to documents that would make any intelligence officer dizzy with delight. Democracy is mainly Guillaume’s story, but in a way is equally Brandt’s story, because the fortunes of the two men were so closely linked that the ups and downs of one seemed to spill over into the other.

Frayn’s play is fast-paced, a whirlwind of political life, showing how Guillaume has to bounce back and forth between his workday life in Brandt’s office and his clandestine meetings with his Stasi contact. Brandt’s private life is equally important to the play: Frayn’s depiction of Brandt’s frequent extramarital affairs with attractive journalists and party workers, his love of alcohol and bad jokes, and his ‘feverish colds’ (the accepted euphemism for his periodic cycles of depression) all combine to create an image of a deeply flawed but driven, almost hunted, political leader. The most tragic aspect of the whole story is the fact that Guillaume’s arrest and Brandt’s subsequent resignation was almost the last thing that the Stasi wanted. Brandt’s Ostpolitik had given East Germany a new standing in the international community, and Guillaume’s arrest was the equivalent of an own goal for East Germany. Democracy highlights this fact, and carries it through to the end of the play — the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reuniting of Germany, and the final words from the play’s two protagonists:

BRANDT: We’re healed and whole. For a little while, at any rate. And for a little while everyone’s glad.
GUILLAUME: And wherever he goes, my shadow goes with him. Together still.

And in the stage production I saw, the lighting shifts to throw both men into shadow. A taller shadow for Brandt and a smaller one for Guillaume…but it is impossible to tell which one overlaps the other. It’s a fine and thought-provoking play, not least because it puts a fascinatingly personal dimension on the Cold War politics of East and West Germany.

Bobby Fischer Goes to War by David Edmonds and John Eidinow

After reading about the arrest of Garry Kasparov at a protest rally in Moscow, I was reminded of this review that I’ve been meaning to post for some time now. Chess-related, understandably.

Bobby Fischer Goes to War by David Edmonds and John Eidinow

David Edmonds and John Eidinow co-authored Wittgenstein’s Poker, an analytical study of an altercation between the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper (allegedly involving the brandishing of a fireplace poker). As might be gathered from this book’s title, Bobby Fischer Goes to War is about more than just a single incident — it’s the story of the 1972 World Chess Championship match played in Reykjavik, Iceland, between reigning chess champion Boris Spassky (of the Soviet Union) and challenger Bobby Fischer (of the United States). At the time, and even into the present day, the championship was touted as yet another Cold War confrontation between the US and the USSR, the plucky young American wunderkind standing up to the Soviet chess machine. Edmonds and Eidinow do their best to pick apart that Cold War myth by setting out the history of the players, the modern chess tournament system, and a near play-by-play account of the match itself.

Edmonds and Eidinow also do a marvellous job at explaining chess in terms that even non-chess players can understand. But the chess comes almost secondary to their description of the events surrounding the match itself, particularly the insane antics of Bobby Fischer. Some accounts of the match claim that Fischer’s constantly changing demands and prolonged temper tantrums over nearly every single aspect of the tournament were in reality a carefully planned psychological attack on Spassky…but reading Edmonds and Eidinow’s account, there seems to be very little question that Fischer’s behaviour was unsporting, uncivilised and just plain bizarre. Complaints about the lighting and the presence of television cameras seem understandable, but when Fischer refused to use the handcrafted marble chessboard made expressly for the match because he claimed that minute imperfections in the stone would distract him during match-play, it is difficult to feel anything but sympathy for anyone who had to spend more than five minutes in Fischer’s presence. Spassky definitely comes out as an unfortunate victim in Bobby Fischer Goes to War, conducting himself with good grace as best as he could — and then returning to the Soviet Union to face an official enquiry as to why he had lost to the brash young American.

My copy of Bobby Fischer Goes to War is subtitled ‘How a Lone American Star Defeated the Soviet Chess Machine’. The subtitle might better read ‘How a Deranged American Star Bullied His Way to Victory’. The book is definitely a gripping account, thoroughly entertaining and well-paced. I certainly came away knowing more about chess and chess play than I ever thought I could learn from 300-odd pages. The book could be made into a fantastic feature film — and if it ever is, I will definitely be there on opening night.

The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong by Jonathan Dimbleby

Thinking about the late Ian Smith has made me look back over my reviews and select a book that deals with decolonisation and the remnants of the British Empire — in this case, the last major imperial remnant.

The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong by Jonathan Dimbleby

I can remember watching the Hong Kong handover on television in July 1997, though I have to admit that I only had the vaguest notion of what was going on or what was the significance of the pomp and circumstance at the time. (Perhaps understandable, seeing as how I was several years away from being able to vote and was only just starting to take an interest in international politics.) The existence of Hong Kong and its status over the years is only generally included in most surveys of Chinese or British history, and even then not many people seem to know what to make of it. So when I came across a book that focused on the handover — and specifically focused on the role that Chris Patten, Hong Kong’s last government, played in the transition period — I thought it would be a good way to fill out a blurry memory with a bit of historical context.

The Last Governor, as might be expected, centres on former Conservative MP Chris Patten’s time as governor of Hong Kong from 1992 (when he lost his seat as MP for Bath) to the end of British colonial rule on 1 July 1997. Quite a few diplomat-types regarded Patten as a strange and alarming choice for governor. Patten certainly wasn’t a sinologist, and he’d barely expressed any particular interest in China or Hong Kong during his time in Parliament. He was a career politician, not a career diplomat, and officials in London and Beijing seemed to share a genuine concern that Patten would try to ‘politicise’ his time as governor and meddle in the political and business negotiations that surrounded the process of Hong Kong’s transition to Chinese sovereignty. The operating thoughts of the officials was that the Hong Kong transition had to be as smooth and unruffled as possible in order to avoid possibly catastrophic effects on Hong Kong’s economy…so many of them were absolutely horrified when the new governor began to push for, well, more democracy in the administration of Hong Kong. With the handover only five years away and the Chinese government already suspicious of what they perceived to be British plans to promote subversion through increased democracy, Patten’s policies left him open to attacks from all quarters. Some officials on both sides definitely would have preferred it if Patten were replaced by a governor who would be friendlier to Chinese interests.

Critics of The Last Governor — most notably the British officials in the Foreign Office and elsewhere who come out looking like utter quislings in Dimbleby’s assessment of their actions — could quite easily subtitle the book ‘How Bloody Chris Patten Aggravated Everyone Under The Sun, Made Things A Billion Times More Difficult For All Of Us, And Didn’t Actually Do Anything Anyway’. For comparison purposes, I’d probably have to look at a book that is more critical of Patten’s stint as governor and see if the criticism of his actions is as convincing as Dimbleby’s defence. But the long and short of it seems to be that Chris Patten did his best to stand up for the people of Hong Kong and keep up a strong front until the very end. The last thing he wanted was to leave the British government open to the charge of cutting and running (a charge often levelled at it by anyone who found it expedient to do so), and he did everything in his power to prevent that. The handover of Britain’s last significant colonial possession has a long and tortuous history behind it, but Dimbleby’s book gives a brisk, journalistic account that should interest most anyone who might want to know more about the events leading up to 1 July 1997.

Blood Lines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism by Vamik Volkan

This article in the Guardian today put me in mind of this review I wrote a while ago.

Blood Lines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism by Vamik Volkan

When writing about international relations, it’s often easy (and tempting) to write about countries as if they were people. Germany didn’t like the way France was doing this, China was upset and therefore — the point is clear enough. By extension, there are times when it is convenient to talk about various ethnic groups in a similar fashion, because the single-mind, single-person outlook makes describing behaviours that much easier. There are quite a lot of dangers inherent in this approach, most of which are self-explanatory and usually boil down to the fact that it’s all too easy to oversimplify matters and not take important but subtle outside factors into account. And yet in accepting this caveat, is it still plausible to look at ethnic groups and treat the group as a distinct ‘individual’ for a different reason? Is it possible, even, to take that ‘individual’ and use a very individual technique — psychoanalysis — to try to understand ethnic conflict from a perspective that’s one step removed from classic models of international relations thought?

Psychiatry professor Vamik Volkan has adopted this kind of psychoanalytial approach to ethnic conflict and international relations in his book Blood Lines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. Volkan has had very personal experience of ethnic conflict, having come from a Turkish Cypriot family who experienced the day-to-day pressures of living side by side with Greek majority on the island of Cyprus. As part of his psychological fieldwork, he has travelled to various places around the world that are caught up in ethnic conflict, attempting to speak to political representatives, smaller group leaders, and ordinary people to understand and interpret different perspectives on ethnic conflict. And on the whole, the addition of a more psychological context provides a different perspective on the standard arguments that tend to be thrown around in international relations studies.

I suppose the most obvious problem with Voltan’s psychological approach (one that I should mention first off, at least) is that you have to accept a lot of Freudian analysis to get through his arguments — and Freud is one of those authors whose writing is either loved or loathed. Even I had to grit my teeth a bit at some of Voltan’s interpretations that seem to veer a little too close to psychobabble for my liking, and there are times when his analysis seems disjointed, if not unconvincing. But some of the sample psychological profiles that Voltan puts together are really quite good and in some cases almost chilling. His analysis of an ideal terrorist leader, for one, provides a sound foundation for understanding the origins and driving forces of human behaviour — the personal factors behind the political violence. While Blood Lines definitely has its good moments and iffy moments, in general I think that the good parts are enough to make it worth reading and possibly going back to for future reference.

English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy by Robert Phillipson

Considering that I’ve studied quite a bit of European Union history, it surprised me to look back through the reviews I’ve written and find that I haven’t really posted many reviews for the books I’ve read on that subject. Here’s one of them, at least.

English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy by Robert Phillipson

It is no secret that over the course of the last century, English has gradually replaced French as the international language of diplomacy and business and even general conversation. One might say that the path to English-language dominance began shortly after the end of World War I, when English and French were used as the official languages of the peace negotiations at Versailles. But with about 20 official languages used in the institutions of the European Union — not to mention the scores of other languages commonly spoken in Europe today — the predominance of the English language has caused no small amount of controversy amongst EU member states. Language is an extremely sensitive subject across the board in Europe, intricately tied to national and regional identities and never far out of the forefront of political and social debate. And while many people in Europe can converse or do business in languages that are not their native tongue, language policy in the European Union is far from cohesive…or even, at times, coherent.

Robert Phillipson is a research professor in the English department of one of Denmark’s largest business schools. His book, English-Only Europe?, examines current EU language policies and makes a fairly convincing argument for the EU to take a more active approach to safeguarding a multilingual Europe into the coming century. The book examines the dangers of leaving general language policy up to individual countries, as well as the problems of merely adopting a laissez-faire attitude toward languages and expecting them to look after themselves. By looking at statistics on language use and language learning both inside and outside the EU, Phillipson considers a wide range of options for creating a more forward-looking set of language policies. Granted, I found some of his ideas a little peculiar — one example being his push for the use of Esperanto as a pivot language in intra-EU communications. Yet most of his suggestions make perfect sense to me: do more to promote and encourage the study of foreign languages and foreign study on all educational levels from pre-primary through post-secondary, look more closely at how non-EU countries manage their language policies (Phillipson mentions Canada and South Africa in this context, as countries worthy of closer study), along with other ideas and suggestions that encourage the learning of another language as a key to better understanding one’s native tongue. And as a native English speaker myself, I am very thankful that Phillipson does not make the critical mistake of completely demonising English, or regarding it as some horrible destructive force that should be feared and shunned in favour of a narrow, insular focus on language defence. The prospect of an ‘English-only Europe’ is not a pleasant one, or one that I would ever like to see come to pass, but the blame cannot be placed solely on the English language and its speakers. A more active and positive approach to the study of other languages has the potential to preserve European multilingualism on all levels — and that multilingualism may very well be one of Europe’s greatest assets in this new, information-driven century.

Reading about language policy is not, I will admit, the most thrilling or engrossing means of spending one’s time unless it happens to be your particular field of study. (It’s only tangentially related to mine.) Phillipson nonetheless does an excellent job of keeping his study in plain English, as the saying goes, and not going off on unrelated tangents or throwing in anecdotes that add nothing to the discussion. I’ve looked through books that make points similar to his in language that appears to be twice as complicated and ten times as unreadable. On the whole, anyone who might be interested in the politics of language and how these kind of politics affect international cooperation might find English-Only Europe? worth investigating.

In Confidence by Anatoly Dobrynin

Politicians’ memoirs usually aren’t the easiest books to carry around and read. They’re often only available in heavy and bulky hardback editions, and they tend to require a more consistent focus than some other history books — not the sort of thing you can put down and pick up again at random. But occasionally there are memoirs that I’d be more than willing to lug around, and today’s review happens to focus on one of them.

In Confidence by Anatoly Dobrynin

Anatoly Dobrynin, born in 1919, served as Soviet ambassador to the United States from 1962 to 1986 — which I believe makes him the longest-serving ambassador in Russian history. In those twenty-four years, he went through the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon (and Kissinger), Ford (and Kissinger), Carter, and Reagan administrations…and on the other side, the Krushchev, Brezhnev (and Kosygin), Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev years. Ambassador Dobrynin outlasted any number of lesser diplomats, and his unbroken record of service and his status as an outsider makes him an interesting choice to report on the history of US/Soviet relations during the tempestuous years of the Cold War.

And report he does. At nearly 700 pages long, In Confidence covers Dobrynin’s entire career. He began, interestingly enough, as an engineer who had never considered himself to be a political person. He was selected for the diplomatic corps during World War II almost against his will, and spent a good deal of time studying American history and working in Moscow before he was sent to the embassy in Washington DC as a foreign affairs attache in the early 1950s. By 1962, he had risen to become ambassador, and his long career as the Soviet government’s representative in America began.

Dobrynin’s memoirs are probably not a good starting point for anyone who isn’t at least familiar with basic Cold War history, particularly the Ford and Carter years where American foreign policy tended to be muddled and contradictory. But there is a wealth of information about how Soviet leaders viewed their American counterparts, much of which comes from Dobrynin’s firsthand experiences and conversations; he spoke fairly fluent English, so on many occasions he was the only translator during talks between Soviet and American higher-ups. Dobrynin’s impressions of different political figures and their attitudes toward US/Soviet relations are rather fascinating — he’s not kind to Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford, for example, and even though he does seem to respect Henry Kissinger’s attempts at detente he quietly slams Kissinger for being inconsistent on how detente was put into practice. One remarkable passage that sticks out in my memory was Dobrynin’s account of Richard Nixon’s final days in office before the resignation…and how Leonid Brezhnev sent Nixon a personal message of support, saying that even though he did not fully understand the nature of the domestic political problems that Nixon was facing, he believed that Nixon’s attempts to improve US/Soviet relations were what his country would truly remember from his presidency. I actually got a little choked up at that part — the thought that possibly the only kind words Nixon had during his final days as President came from the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union appeals to my sense of bittersweet irony. And Dobrynin manages to capture this incident and many more without being too quick to blame one side or the other for the policy failures and setbacks.

In Confidence, like many political memoirs worth reading, is not the kind of book that can be read straight through in one sitting. But it’s a refreshing perspective on a strange and often nerve-wracking era in history, and Dobrynin is articulate and possessed of a dry wit that crackles through the pages and makes his anecdotes all the more intriguing.

D.C. Confidential by Christopher Meyer

Today’s book review might well be called ‘Adventures in Diplomacy!’ — if you’ve a mind to be ironic about such things, that is.

D.C. Confidential by Christopher Meyer

D.C. Confidential caused quite a kerfluffle (or two or three) when excerpts from it were printed in the Guardian back in October 2004. Christopher Meyer (or rather, Sir Christopher Meyer) was the British ambassador to the US until fairly recently, and observed the interactions between the US and the UK in the days after 11 September and through the events leading up to the war in Iraq. And while D.C. Confidential isn’t wholly centred on Sir Christopher’s time on Massachusetts Avenue, the portions of it that are have provoked something of a firestorm over ‘breaches of confidence’ and accusations that as a former diplomat Meyer violated the Official Secrets Act in writing this book. While that’s as may be, I think that D.C. Confidential violates the boundaries of good taste more often that it threatens the very fabric of national security.

The real target in D.C. Confidential is not George W. Bush and the White House, but Blair and his Downing Street team. The vitriol almost pours off the pages in places, contempt and scorn evident in his description of Blair putting on a pair of ‘ball-crushingly tight dark-blue corduroys’ in an attempt to look hip and relaxed at Camp David, or when Meyer recalls that Cherie Blair’s hairdresser was left behind (!) on that same trip to Camp David and had to be helicoptered out of there to catch up to the rest of the Blair entourage. But the deeper layer to this bitterness is Meyer’s belief that Blair and the Downing Street courtiers, seduced by the power of the Presidency, shoved the Foreign Office out of the way in order to cuddle up to Bush and the neoconservatives. And naturally, that means that the ambassador-as-FO-functionary loses stature, and in the socio-political whirl inside the Beltway that loss of stature (or even a perceived loss of stature) can be absolutely fatal to an ambassador’s ability to schmooze and socialise freely. Or for that matter, to gain access to the ears of those inside the White House.

Politics aside, Meyer himself doesn’t come across as the most likeable person in general. He spends quite a bit of time rhapsodising about the work his wife Catherine did to promote awareness of international child custody disputes and parental abduction of dual-national children — honourable and decent work, to be sure, but there are places where it seems tossed into the narrative for little or no reason. Meyer’s description of his wife also tends to dwell on her physical attributes in a way that isn’t so much laddish as it is boorish — perhaps I’m being overly sensitive to such things, but several other reviews of this book have also commented on it as well. The diplomatic name-dropping is extensive and perhaps predictable, though in places it’s done to an extent that a better editor would have excised certain sections with a flamethrower. There are places where Meyer writes quite well (the section concerning his time as John Major’s press secretary is enjoyable to read), but they seem to be overshadowed by the bits where he gets far too fond of the sound of his own voice, so to speak.

It’s easy to see why D.C. Confidential has upset so many people. Meyer’s writing style is abrasive, his targets are ambitious, his conclusions are condemning — this book is designed to be confrontational. But the book also has the flavour of one of those angry and abusive letters that you write in the heat of the moment…and, if you’ve any sense, fold up and put aside until the next day when you can read what you’ve written in the cold light of the morning. Sometimes it’s fun to reread those kind of letters, and sometimes what is written is enough to make you cringe. I personally found myself cringing more often than not.