Choose Your Weapons: The British Foreign Secretary - Hardcover

Hurd Of Westwell CH CBE PC, The Rt Hon Lord Douglas

3,89

36 Bewertungen von Goodreads

9780297853343: Choose Your Weapons: The British Foreign Secretary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297853341 ISBN 13: 9780297853343

Verlag: W&N, 2010

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Cr�ticas:

Douglas Hurd has done the impossible...he has produced a page-turning book about the history of British foreign policy. (Denis MacShane THE INDEPENDENT)

Hurd elegantly profiles eleven British foreign secretaries... Written with a lightness of touch despite its serious message, one only hopes David Miliband buys a copy. (GQ)

One of the great achievements of this thoughtful and elegant book is to emphasise the thread of continuity running through British foreign policy from the age of Napoleon to the cold war... a book of great authority and insight. (Dominic Sandbrook THE SUNDAY TIMES)

Highly readable... I enjoyed Choose Your Weapons immensely, particularly the magnificently colourful account of the Bevin and Eden years... it is also a timely book... Any future foreign secretary would be well advised to read this engrossing book on their first day in office. (Jack Straw THE OBSERVER)

a highly readable fusion of archival scholarship and personal experience, mixing vivid portrayals of the personalities and private lives of their chosen protagonists with cool analysis of the policy choices they made (John Campbell MAIL ON SUNDAY)

This is a fascinating book (David Owen GUARDIAN)

Hurd brings forward the arguments from history to consider the role of diplomacy in the modern world, and how a British government has to balance the interests of the nation with the ideals which its leaders and its people prefer. (TOTAL POLITICS)

it is Hurd's own viewpoint - as a longtime occupant of the Foreign Secretary's awe-inspring room- that gives this book the sort of insider perspective that Roy Jenkins gave to his life of Churchill. (COUNTRY LIFE)

full of wry, unillusioned wisdom. There are some delicious apercus... All Douglas Hurd's characters are portrayed sympathetically, even when they fail. (Bruce Anderson THE INDEPENDENT)

That Douglas Hurd was once Foreign Secretary lends piquancy to his elegant account of that office... a very canny, diplomatic book. (Stuart Kelly SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY)

Rese�a del editor:

When writing his magnificent life of Robert Peel, Douglas Hurd found himself caught up again in a debate that has always fascinated him as a former diplomat and Foreign Secretary - the argument between the noisy popular liberal interventionist approach and the more conservative diplomatic approach concentrating on co-operation between other nations. The argument has run for two centuries - and is at the heart of heated discussion on both sides of the Atlantic today.

Hurd concentrates on personalities and circumstances. He begins with the dramatic antagonism after Waterloo between Canning (liberal, populist, interventionist) and Castlereagh (institutions, compromise, real politics) - the last occasion on which ministerial colleagues fought a duel. A generation later comes Palmerston vs Aberdeen, from which Palmerston, the noisy interventionist, emerged the victor. A fascinating, but forgotten vignette is provided by the quarrel between Disraeli and his old friend and Foreign Secretary, Lord Derby, which led to Derby resigning as a protest against jingoism and Disraeli spreading the rumour that Lady Derby was leaking secrets to the Russian Ambassador. Salisbury and then Edward Grey wrestled with the same dilemma in the context of imperialism (Salisbury) and the European balance of power (Grey). Between the wars, another vignette describing Austen Chamberlain, the decent, monocled Foreign Secretary who began as an idealist (Locarno Treaty) and ended as a passionate opponent of appeasement. Finally Eden and Bevin, from wholly different backgrounds, combined with the Americans to create a post-war compromise, which served its purpose for half a century, but is coming apart today as the old questions resurface in new and savage forms in an era of terrorism and racial conflict.

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