Execution of Duty
He was a dark and stormy knight. She was a Swede, 16. Lightning flashed tritely as his Vespa 10cc thundered past the skull-topped wall of the old Same mansion. Sullenly, they disappeared into a fog as thick as midnight marshmallow. Their paragraph…
Party Lines from Moscow
“I was sent there as an insult — not just to deliver an insult, a mission for a more senior diplomat, but to be one,” John Holmes later recalled of his posting to Moscow as Chargé d’Affaires in 1947. In the wake…
Glyn Berry 1948–2006
We all know that the profession of diplomacy can be a very dangerous occupation, but our worst fears were realized in January. Glyn Berry, a career foreign service officer, was killed in Kandahar, Afghanistan on January 14, 2006 by a suicide bomb…
Force 136 and the Liberation of Malaya: the Chinese-Canadian Connection
In mid-1944, thirteen Chinese-Canadians were spending the summer at a remote camp on the shores of beautiful Okanagan Lake in British Columbia. This, however, was no ordinary summer camp®
A Gift of Time
In 2002-03, after 24 years and 11 different assignments in the Department, I took a year off. A 12-month sabbatical with time to play, read, travel, and do different things that my work schedule did not usually allow.
Confessions of an Innocent Man: Torture and Survival in a Saudi Prison
This is a story of torture. And it is not torture “lite” as one of the contemporary faddish terms would have it in attempting to provide moral and political justification for such acts. It is not a book for the squeamish or…
Mackenzie King: Friends and Lovers
Louise Reynolds has written a fascinating account of the personal and private life of Canada’s longest-serving Prime Minister. Her earlier book, Agnes: The Biography of Lady Macdonald, was well received by the critics. The present volume is dedicated to the memory of…
How the Cold War Began: The Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies
Through diligent research, assisted by greater access to archival material than was possible until recently, Amy Knight has brought to bear her great expertise on Soviet history to produce one of the finest books on the Gouzenko Affair, which she rightly terms…
Round the World with Two Teenagers
It was an inspired idea — take a year off and backpack around the world with two teenagers. From September 2004 through April 2005 together with our two youngest children, Emmanuelle then 15 and Christoffer then 13, Christine and I backpacked through…
Prester John, I Presume?
in the first decades of the thirteentl Lcentury, rumours began to circulate Il the Middle East and Europe about a new and terrible power emerging in Upper Asia Some rumours associated these “Tartars” with Prester John (“John the Priest”), a mythical Christian…
