Book reviews 2011 – 2014

The Demilitarization of American Diplomacy: Two cheers for striped pants

(Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2014), pp. 88 (incl. index). ISBN 10: 1137298545 / ISBN 13: 9781137298546 The trenchant contribution to this subject of the outstanding American scholar-diplomat Laurence Pope is published in Palgrave’s ‘Pivot’ series of short books designed to be brought out quickly. Its contents list and other details, including numerous well-deserved plaudits, can be [...]

Radio Free Europe: An insider’s view

(New Academia Publishing: Washington, DC, 2013), pp. 139 (incl. index). ISBN 978-0-9886376-8-9. [Buy this book] James F. Brown, who held joint British-American citizenship and died in 2009, spent 27 years at the Munich home of Radio Free Europe (RFE), rising to the post of director in 1978. However, uncomfortable with the aggressive tone he was [...]

Diplomatenleben

Akteure, Schauplätze, Zwischenrufe – Ein Lesebuch 2013. 436 S. Geb. CHF 48.00 / EUR 39.50 ISBN 978-3-0340-1206-5. [buy this book] A must-have for German-speaking students of Swiss diplomacy (and diplomacy generally) since the Second World War is Dr. Max Schweizer’s recently published Diplomatenleben. This contains 60 texts – mostly in German – written by career [...]

Last Man Standing: Memoirs of a political survivor

(Pan Macmillan: London, 2013), pp. 582 (incl. index). ISBN 978-1-4472-2276-7. [buy this book] [Kindle ed] Jack Straw was the ablest and wisest of Tony Blair’s foreign secretaries and served in this capacity from 2001 until he was ungratefully dumped without warning by his leader in 2006. Afterwards he hit the headlines by courageously publishing his [...]

British Diplomacy and the Descent into Chaos: The career of Jack Garnett, 1902-19

(Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2012), 280 pp (incl. index). ISBN 978-0-230-34897-4. [buy this book] [Kindle ed] I am in favour of biographies of relatively obscure individuals like Jack Garnett because there are plenty of them on the famous; moreover, studies of this kind often turn up interesting details (including how the famous were seen from the [...]

Transformational Diplomacy after the Cold War: Britain’s Know How Fund in Post-Communist Europe, 1989-2003

(Routledge: London and New York, 2013), 224 pp. (incl. index). ISBN13: 978-0-415-69203-8 (hbk). ISBN13: 978-0-203-38158-8 (ebk). [buy this book] This is the long awaited history of the Know How Fund (KHF) produced by the recently retired Foreign and Commonwealth Office historian Keith Hamilton. Like other FCO ‘internal histories’, it was initially written ‘to provide background [...]

21st Century Diplomacy: A practitioner’s guide

(Continuum: London and New York, 2011), 372pp (incl. index). ISBN: 9781441168382. Available in pb at £19.99. [buy this book] Kishan Rana is a man of lengthy and varied experience in the Indian Foreign Service, ending his career as ambassador to Germany. Since then he has spent many years as a globe-trotting trainer of junior diplomats [...]

Economic Diplomacy: India’s experience

(CUTS International: Jaipur, 2011), 285pp. (incl. index). ISBN 978 81 8257 139 6. Kishan Rana is a widely published former Indian ambassador and Bipul Chatterjee, his co-editor, is the deputy executive director of the Indian NGO, CUTS International http://www.cuts-international.org/ , the publisher of this book. Both editors are also trained economists. Their volume consists of [...]

The Practice of Diplomacy: Its evolution, theory and administration

2nd ed (Routledge: London and New York, 2011), pp. 317 (incl. index). [buy this book] [Kindle ed] First published in 1995, the long-awaited second edition of this valuable textbook on the history of diplomacy has at last appeared. The first chapter has been expanded to include non-European traditions, and a wholly new chapter has been [...]

Go to Top