1. There was I … in the lurch: A music-hall favourite popularized by the singer Vesta Victoria (1873–1951). ‘Waiting at the Church’ was also sung in 1978 at a TUC conference by the Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, to convey that there wouldn’t be a general election that year.
2. Generals de Gaulle and Leclerc: In 1940, while Marshal Pétain was collaborating with the Nazis, Chad became the first French colony to declare its support for Charles de Gaulle’s Free France. Under General Leclerc, Chadian and French troops fought Italian soldiers in Libya before marching 1,500 miles to join Montgomery in Tripoli. Chadian soldiers also won distinction in European theatres of war; in 1945 the Régiment de Marche du Tchad were among the Allied troops who captured Hitler’s Berghof at Berchtesgaden, a mountain hideaway where the Nazi leader spent much of the war.
1. Melekoosh: John Major’s horse was actually called Maksat. The name Melekoosh on the breed papers denoted the stallion that sired him.
2. President Niyazov: A brutal and vainglorious dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov, ruled Turkmenistan from 1991 until his death in 2006. He renamed the months of the year after members of his family and national heroes. One statue of the President, twelve metres tall and gold-plated, rotated every twenty-four hours so as to always face the sun.
1. President and Mrs Tolbert: William Tolbert, President of Liberia 1971–80.
2. King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola: Baudouin I reigned over Belgium, 1951–93. In the 1870s his great-great-grandfather King Leopold II seized the Congo, an area seventy-six times the size of Belgium, as his personal domain. Millions of Congolese died in the decades that followed through forced labour, shootings and disease. The quite staggering brutality of Belgian colonial rule was hardly likely to have endeared Baudouin to the man on the African street.
3. complete my quotation: Dawbarn had someone in the Department (‘diligent as ever’) look up Morris’s lines for him, and the full text was sent back to Addis Ababa: ‘Then we shall be with those at rest / Asleep beyond the tomb.’
1. Longmoor: Training area in Hampshire used by the Royal Military Police Close Protection team.
2. DHC … porterage allowance: DHC is Deputy High Commissioner. The FCO is famously stingy in the porterage allowances paid to lower ranks for luggage taken abroad.
1. ‘Brazilian Adventure’: Peter Fleming’s book, published in 1933, was a first-hand account of an expedition tracing the steps of Colonel Percy Fawcett, who had vanished into the Brazilian jungle eight years previously. Russell said that in 1967 this remained the most up-to-date travel literature available for his trip.
2. ‘Black Mischief’: Evelyn Waugh novel, 1932. See also Willie Morris’s despatch, p. 57.
3. Beau-Geste: Literally, a gesture or sacrifice which is noble, but futile. Also the title of a 1966 Hollywood film in which the French Foreign Legion defended a fort against Tuareg attacks.
4. Procrustes: In Greek mythology, Procrustes was a rogue metalsmith who invited unwary travellers to sleep the night on an ill-sized iron bed – and then either stretched or amputated their limbs to fit.
5. Mr Todd … ‘Little Dorrit’: From Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 novel, A Handful of Dust. Wandering delirious in the Brazilian jungle, the protagonist Tony is rescued by a Mr Todd, who then keeps him captive, reading aloud the complete works of Dickens for Todd’s entertainment, until the end of his days.
6. ‘the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River … fever trees’: From ‘The Elephant’s Child’, one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories (1902). The Limpopo is in central-southern Africa.
7. John Gunther: American journalist (1901–70).
1. Phipps took a strong dislike to the Nazis: Our commentary here draws on an excellent study by Peter Neville. Entitled ‘The Foreign Office and Britain’s Ambassadors to Berlin, 1933–39’, this essay can be found in Gaynor Johnson’s The Foreign Office and British Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2005).
2. Wotan: The pagan god Wotan was in vogue in 1930s Germany. Nazi youth sacrificed sheep for him on the solstice. In a 1936 essay, the psychologist Carl Jung diagnosed Wotan as ‘a fundamental attribute of the German psyche, an irrational psychic factor which acts on the high pressure of civilization like a cyclone and blows it away’.
3. Siegfried: The third opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle. The eponymous hero kills a dragon and then breaks Wotan’s spear with a blow from his sword. As in the Excalibur myth, the sword was embedded (this time by the great god Odin, in a tree) and only the chosen one could pull it out.
4. Fräulein Sonnemann: Göring did in fact make an honest woman of Emma Sonnemann, his ‘private secretary’, the following year. In 1938 Emma bore him a daughter, and to celebrate Göring ordered 500 of his Luftwaffe pilots to fly a salute over Berlin. Had it been a boy, Göring said, he would have ordered twice that number.
5. Swedish wife: After the First World War, Göring found work as a commercial airline pilot in Sweden, where he met Baroness Carin von Kantzow. It was love at first sight, even though she was five years his senior and already had a husband (albeit estranged) and a child. Carin returned to Munich with Göring and they married in 1922. She liked Hitler and would often entertain him and other Nazis at the Göring home. Göring was heartbroken when Carin died from heart failure in 1931, following a bout of tuberculosis.
1. frais de representation: Expenses.
1. ‘Prenez vos places … deja en retard, Excellences’: ‘Take your places on the aeroplane, quickly, quickly … we are already late, Excellencies.’
2. ‘en cas de besoin’: ‘In case he needed her.’
3. ‘Pour une demi-heure … N’oubliez-pas vos baggages’: ‘For half an hour’s rest, Excellencies. Do not forget your luggage.’
4. ‘exactement a l’heure prevue’: ‘Exactly on time.’
5. ‘Le gout de dedans est meilleur’: ‘The taste is better on the inside.’
1. ‘l’ouverture de l’année judiciaire’: ‘The opening of the judicial year’.
2. Garde des Sceaux: Keeper of the Seals.
3. Bouteflika: In 1971 Abdelaziz Bouteflika was Minister for Foreign Affairs. Today he is President of Algeria.
4. ‘regagner ses forces’: ‘Regain his strength’.
5. ‘Il aura beaucoup de force, quand il rentre’: ‘He will have much strength, when he returns.’
6. ‘C’est un Arabe très très pur’: ‘It is a very very pure Arabic.’
7. ‘Je n’ai aucune idée. Il a un très mauvais accent’: ‘I have no idea. He has a very bad accent.’
1. mummified head … for Voodoo purposes: Larmour should have tried the closet. The head belonged to Blucher Philogenes, an army officer who led a failed coup attempt in 1963. Duvalier kept this gruesome souvenir in a cupboard, so the story goes, believing it could predict the future.
2. fate of Sejanus: Sejanus (20 BC–AD 31), a Roman soldier, used his friendship with the Emperor to gain high political office, and became de facto ruler of the entire Roman Empire when the reclusive Tiberius left Rome for Capri in AD 26. Sejanus consolidated his power through bloody purges. His downfall five years later was swift; arrested on suspicion of conspiring against the Emperor, Sejanus was strangled and his body cast down on the Gemonian Stairs; a dishonourable death.
3. arcana imperii: State secrets.
1. vade mecum: Guidebook.
2. Verein für Deutsche Schäferhunde: Association for German Shepherd Dogs.
3. post-Plowden: The recommendations of the 1964 Plowden Committee on Representational Service Overseas led to a greater emphasis on the promotion of exports, and a reduction in ambassadors’ traditional ‘political’ work.