Beginning and Ending: A Canadian Ambassador in Moscow
There is a wonderful image of exhaustion and elation in Chariots of Fire when Eric Liddell wins the 400 metres at the Olympic Games in Paris in 1924. The cinematic treatment of that event stresses his unlikely victory (in a race longer…
The Constant Diplomat: Robert Ford in Moscow
Robert Ford joined Canada’s foreign ministry – then the Department of External Affairs – in July 1940, when being a diplomat, especially a Canadian diplomat, still mattered. It was a simpler time, or so it sometimes seems in retrospect, when diplomacy was…
Difficult Dinners
by Mary Taylor a I
Social Purgatory in the Socialist Paradise
Readers of bout de papier wil! be familiar with John Watkins, whose last letter to John Holmes was reprinted under the title “From one ‘fantaisiste’ to another” (Volume 23, Number 2). In the aftermath of the revelations by Igor Gouzenko about Soviet…
Paul Whelan
He left us far too soon. After a long battle with pulmonary fibrosis, Paul Whelan died on December 4, 2007.
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…
Alexander D. “Sandy” Bryce 1940–2001
Friday, 31st August, 2001, St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church, Ottawa
Other Duties as Required
ин! we cany lyrus. At that time, I was a newly- tic minted Immigration Officer and spent much of my time interviewing prospective immigrants and writing reports on Sweden. In those years we were required to prepare a Monthly Narrative Report (MNR),…
A Canadian Visitor in Moscow, 1952
he death of Pierre Elliott Trudeau — and subsequent recollections of his life and times – reminds us that he was a bold and inquisitive traveller long before his tenure as a national and international statesman. Some veterans of the foreign service…
Raising Eyebrows: An Undiplomatic Memoir
by Peter Roberts
