Xan Smiley
Mission Statements
Living the Cold War: Memoirs of a British Diplomat
By Christopher Mallaby
Amberley 304pp £20 order from our bookshop
As a diplomatic novice of twenty-four, Christopher Mallaby was at the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 1960 when Nikita Khrushchev, having previously told the West, ‘We will bury you’, banged his shoe on the table. That was just a start. During his career, Mallaby found himself drawn into just about every imbroglio of the Cold War. Based in Moscow, he was privy to nail-biting diplomacy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He helped draft and insert the human rights clause in the Final Act of the Helsinki Agreement between the West and the Soviet Union in 1975, which, as he puts it, ‘contributed to the decline and later the collapse of the communist regimes in Europe’. He was involved in the tortuous negotiations over the nuclear test ban treaty later in that decade. He interpreted for British ministers at meetings with Khrushchev and later with Andrei Gromyko, the inscrutable ‘Mr Nyet’ of Soviet foreign policy. And, as a sideshow from the Cold War, he was in the thick of Margaret Thatcher’s campaign to expel the Argentines from the Falkland Islands in 1982.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me
In this month's Bookends, @AdamCSDouglas looks at the curious life of Henry Labouchere: a friend of Bram Stoker, 'loose cannon', and architect of the law that outlawed homosexual activity in Britain.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-gross-indecency
'We have all twenty-nine of her Barsetshire novels, and whenever a certain longing reaches critical mass we read all twenty-nine again, straight through.'
Patricia T O'Conner on her love for Angela Thirkell. (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad