Christopher Andrew

Decisions, Decisions

Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy

By

Oxford University Press 223pp £20 order from our bookshop

After moving from Harvard to the US government, Henry Kissinger said, ‘As a professor, I tended to think of history as run by impersonal forces. But when you see it in practice, you see the differences personalities make.’ The same conclusion emerges from Gill Bennett’s masterly study of six moments of crisis in British foreign policy, from the Korean War to the Falklands War. In each crisis the personalities who mattered most were not officials and special advisers but ministers, and in particular the prime minister. The more serious the crisis the greater his or her influence.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Moore’s work has been so influential that the former ministers who provided him with much of his information now r… ,
    • 'Although he travels through time and space to find the best produce, his choices, delightfully, are not obvious.'… ,
    • RT : I regularly make purchases based on - it’s excellent.,
    • RT : I wrote about Yoko Ogawa's dreamlike, allegorical novel The Memory Police, newly published in English in a translat… ,
    • 'At this frankly apocalyptic moment for indigenous rights in Brazil, John Hemming’s "People of the Rainforest" is a… ,
    • 'I was dumbfounded by the view of the Berlin Wall from the eastern side. It seemed inconceivable that in under thre… ,
    • RT : Danger for ‘local’ staff, access in exchange for silence (and logos) - all sounds familiar in this fascinating look… ,
    Follow Us