Diplomatic memoirs were once a staple of serious publishers; nowadays they are privately printed, if published at all. But the appetite for memoirs of the ‘trailing spouse’, the plucky ‘diplomatic baggage’, seems insatiable. A phalanx of distinguished critics rolled out on the dustjacket has greeted Brigid Keenan’s contribution, the latest to this popular genre, as a masterpiece. It’s not; but it’s fun and I suspect it of being quite a spoof too.
The gifted wife of the current EU ambassador to Kazakhstan, a professional journalist, has whiled away time in Almaty, capital of the land of the Soviet gulags, in lacing a highly coloured account of her 30-year marriage to her steady eurocrat husband with every funny story to come her way in Nepal, Ethiopia, West Africa, India, the West Indies, Syria and Kazakhstan, not to mention London and Brussels.
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