Ask a serving ambassador for a personal opinion on matters of world or national import and you will likely be met with a carefully crafted diplomatic response. Ask a retired ambassador the same question and you might open the floodgates of frankness: long-repressed views on what should or should not have been done; memories of drunk or otherwise wayward politicians on visits to major capitals; stories of first posts, or slights and entanglements with haughty counterparts, like Lawrence Durrell’s Antrobus stories. This is the grist and mill of diplomatic memoirs and what makes them such rewarding reading.
Terence O’Brien’s joins anumber of(2011), Gerald Hensley’s Malcolm Templeton’s (1989), and a decade later, and the often acerbic letters of Alister McIntosh, Frank Corner, George Laking and Foss Shanahan. These are effectively windows into the world –New Zealand’s world –and detail the misgivings of the foreign affairs mandarins on joining Anzus in 1951, decolonialisation in the South Pacific in the 1960s, and now, with O’Brien, the building of our relationship with Asia, particularly China. All of which tell us a lot about the world we live in now.
