Affords an English-speaking audience rare access to the revealing correspondence between two Nobel prize winners. Marie-Noelle Little's expansive prologue to this book, sets the stage for situating the two world-renowned personalities in their exchange of letters during the six years before Hammarskjold's death. The letters themselves are characterized by world vision, a noble tone, and delicate sentiments. Alexis Leger - later known as the poet Saint-John Perse - and Dag Hammarskjold were important figures in diplomatic and literary spheres and their lives shared a number of uncanny parallels that eventually brought them into contact with one another. Alexis Leger, French Secretary General of Foreign Affairs, perhaps saw in Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold the continuation of his diplomatic career, while Hammarskjold, in the midst of difficult international crisies, found inspiration and strength in reading and translating Perse's poem Chronique. This correspondence has both literary and political content that sheds light on some of the major political events of the day but also serves as an important manifestation of the tradition of connecting diplomacy and the arts.

The fascinating biography of one of America's most colorful diplomats

The leaders and politics of the Soviet Union seen through the eyes of an experienced ambassador.

Stalin's reign of terror was not all doom and gloom, much of it was (meant to be) funny! Tracing the development of official humour, satire, and comedy, Dobrenko and Jonsson-Skradol do away with the idea that all humour in the USSR was subversive, instead exploring why laughter was a core component to the survival of the Soviet regime.

Prepared to honour the work of R. J. Lyall, this collection of essays offers new perspectives on the literature and culture of the reign of James VI, from his accession as an infant to the throne of Scotland, through the Union of the Crowns, to his final years as king of Great Britain. Its emphasis is on James’s reign as a whole, stressing the continuities in literary culture throughout the time of his rule, rather than the more familiar narrative of disjunction caused by his accession to the English throne in the 1603 Union of Crowns. In addition, the collection extends its focus beyond a concentration on the environment of James’s court to situate the literature of his reign in terms of both regional and international contexts. The essays range widely in their approaches and cover topics as diverse as book history and printing; textual scholarship and editing; language, rhetoric, and prosody; gender attitudes in James’s reign; travel writing and colonial contexts; Latin literary culture; and courtly culture and the politics of literary representation. Such variety is also evident in the languages discussed, which include Scots, English, Latin and French, in the generic range of the subject texts, from epic poetry to travel writing, and in the writers discussed, from the very familiar, such as John Knox and Robert Aytoun, to the currently less well-known, such as William Lithgow and Thomas Hudson. All the contributors are respected scholars in the discipline, including some of the most senior figures in the field. Taken as a whole, this collection is the most extensive and varied treatment of Scottish literary culture of this period to date, and will be a key collection for all students and specialists in the field.

This important new verse translation of the extant works and major fragments of Callimachus includes a full Introduction, covering the poet's life and times, the range of his achievements, and the difficulties in the way of appreciation. It does not offer, as other translations do, a mere selection of fragments but presents them as integral parts of the poetry books in which they originally figured, as these can be reconstructed in the light of modern research. Each fragment is introduced in relation to what precedes and follows it, enabling students and general readers, for the first time ever, to assess what Callimachus was like in his most important productions. In addition to this introductory help, the Notes take up individual points of difficulty, all proper names and adjectives are explained in the Glossary, and comparative tables facilitate identification of the translated fragments in the standard editions.

This classic account of interwar diplomacy examines the curious fate of the diplomat, “the honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country,” in the capitals of a darkening Europe. These men—ambassadors in the field and officials in the Foreign Office—worked against time in a world that witnessed the complete reorganization of the European system amid the onslaught of totalitarianism. Leading experts investigate the diplomatic history of these years through the eyes of those entrusted with the extraordinarily delicate task of conducting the fateful negotiations that effect national policy. Drawing on government archives, European memoirs, and diplomatic studies, this book is both an absorbing history of twenty years of crisis and a searching analysis of the role of diplomacy in the modern age.

In Diplomacy in Postwar British Literature and Culture, Krzakowski shows how matters of international relations--refugee crises, tribunals, espionage, and diplomatic practice--have influenced the thematic and formal concerns of twentieth-century cultural production.