Adrift on a Stormy Ocean

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 399, 14 February 1947, Page 12

Adrift on a Stormy Ocean

HE BBC Pacific Service has been running a series of talks on Sunday evening on British foreign policy. This is a somewhat controversial subject, and I shouldn't be surprised if by now the talks director is wishing he had never had the idea. The series was started by four talks from E. H. Carr, Professor of International Politics at the University College of Wales, and author of several authoritative books, including Conditions of Peace. Professor Carr was as lucid and logical over the air as he is on paper, and although his assessment of Britain’s present power would have distressed Mr. Churchill, he did not say anything particularly devastating. Another gentleman, whose name I forget, commented for a couple of weeks on some of Professor Carr’s conclusions, and then A. J. P. Taylor, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, was introduced for a series of three talks. He gave two of them in an urbane, precise, Oxford manner, wielding a polished hatchet against America and the military mind. It was a very sharp hatchet. The third Sunday he did not appear, and we had some music. The talks director produced some pianissimo experts for a week or two after that, and I lost interest and listened to something else, but I fear he has again stumbled on someone who has a prickly outlook, and again it appears that the Foreign Office has been breathing down his neck, for last Sunday it was announced that in place of the scheduled talk on British foreign policy we were to hear some Beethoven dances, I hope the talks director, who is obviously doing his best, has escaped the Foreign Office’s gorillas and is safe in the bosom of his family. »