In the United States several diplomats have written profound books about countries where they have been posted. For example, the works on the Soviet Union by George Kennan and Chip Bohlen were among the most important studies of that once menacing empire. I remember little recently by British ambassadors apart from Percy Cradock’s admirable Experiences of China. Autobio- graphies there have, of course, been in plenty, amongst which I rank highest Lord Vansittart’s extraordinary The Mist Process- ion, a curious mixture of arrogance and melancholy, each chapter of which had as an epigraph a line from one of the author’s own poems. There was Eastern Approaches of Fitzroy Maclean with its famous vignette of the show trials of 1937. There have also been essential diaries, such as those of Cadogan and Nicholas Henderson. But that is not the same thing. Someone will remind me of the first Lord Redesdale’s brilliant little book about Japan, The Garter Mission. But that was long, long ago.
This lack of scholarly production is because most British diplomats serve too short a time in a post to become serious specialists in the society on which they have to report. Often, the visitor has to rely on the ambassador’s chauffeur if he wants to know what happenned in the elections before last in the country concerned! The days when a kind of oriental secretary — such as the wonderfully well-informed Bernard Malley in Madrid, or the social Sir Charles Mendl in Paris — was in the embassy indefinitely have long passed.
This lack of writing is particuarly regrettable in respect of countries whose societies are closed to the rest of the world. Diplomats can operate with much more freedom than journalists. I was always sorry that Bill Marchant (Sir Herbert Marchant), who was ambassador 1960 to 1963, once a master at Harrow and the best representative we have had in Cuba in the last generation (as shown by his published despatches), did not write about his time there.
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