SLICE OF LIFE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 796, 22 October 1954, Page 14

SLICE OF LIFE

AMBASSADORS AND SECRET AGENTS, by Alfred Cobban; Jonathan Cape, English price 21/-. HIS is the kind of book that experts should write more often than they do. Professor Cobban has lived so long and intimately with his documents and through them with the men whose lives they portray, that he gives us a slice of life itself, refreshing alike for expert and general reader. The expert will find in it a day-to-day — at times an hour-to-hour-account of countless secret agents fishing in the swirling waters of Dutch politics on the eve of the French revo-

lution; the details are related in masterly fashion to world politics. The general reader can pass quickly through the tangle of names to a human drama, worked out with the ingenuity of a detective story, and studded ‘with wise and illuminating remarks by author and characters alike. James Harris, the hero, was a man ability and patridtism who played his hand well in a

small country torn by internal conflict and uneasily placed between three great Powers. These had no intention of leaving the Dutch to work out their own salvation; and the campaigns of the "cold war" seethed through the United Provinces, raising issues that are astonishingly contemporary. Ideologies counted for something in the diplomatic game, but personalities for more. Money was essential, and hospitality weighed heavier than reason. The personality of the Younger Pitt cuts insistently through. Indeed, one major theme of the book is the contrast between French willingness to promise rashly and Pitt’s insistence that the friends of Britain must be led to expect no more than she could fulfil. The book ends with a British triumph, the enforcing agency of which was, conveniently, a Prussian army. The whole makes good reading, and stimulating ammunition for those who believe that "all history is contemporary

history."

F. L. W.

Wood