I doubt if a single British diplomat has gone abroad without having read 1066 And All That. They have probably read Parkinson’s Law too – and I wish they had heeded his wisdom.

Wonderful. Sir George Buchanan belonged to the generation which was born to rule.
I hope I do not do him an injustice but my recollection is that Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s foreign secretary in 1914, had a marked aversion to being abroad. I wish he had not let Britain slip into the Great War.

“In the period just before 1914, when most foreign services were not equipped to handle commercial matters, the British Board of Trade – the then Ministry of Commerce – asked the Foreign Office to provide information about arms manufacture in Imperial Russia. The Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, replied to this enquiry that he had not been sent as His Majesty’s Ambassador to the Russian Court to do arithmetical computations for the Board of Trade.”

A school dedicated to diplomacy seems like a good idea.
[ http://www.academiediplomatique.org/en/ ] and
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_School_of_Diplomacy_and_International_Relations ]

A course on the history of diplomacy would seem to be essential. [ http://www.1066andallthat.com/english_contemporary/diplomacy_02.asp ]

The word diplomacy immediately makes me think of the account of a diplomat as ‘a good man sent abroad to lie for his country’, so I had better remember Kipling too ‘If any question why we died/Tell them, because our fathers lied’. Since the Kipling quote is so good (he was stricken with grief at the loss of his son) I am tempted to remember the gaiety of poppies as symbolizing the way in which the ‘fathers’ romanticized the prospect of going war. Maybe we could extend this to symbolizing diplomacy: the diplomats and generals who went to war in 1914 had no conception of how terrible it was going to be. They were ‘gentlemen’ and I read an account of the war this summer which pointed to a Canadian and a New Zealander as being the best allied generals of the war: they were both ‘men of the people’ rather than rosy-eyed gentlemen who thought poppies a good symbol with which to remember the war.