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Sign in and save to read later Print this article Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Get a link Request Reprint Permissions "AND how," inquired a visitor to Sans Souci in 1768, "how would Your Majesty define the English system?" "The English," snapped Frederick the Great, "have no system." The events of the last six months might appear to confirm this apophthegm.
By Harold Nicolson October 1, 1961 Courtesy Reuters Since 1914 the structure of the world has changed. Compared to the present struggle between West and East, the rivalries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sink into insignificance. Today we are faced, not with a clash of interests, but with a fight between ideologies, between the desire on the one hand to defend individual liberties and the resolve on the other hand to impose a mass religion.
Politics has many different areas in which to specialise. What made you decide on negotiation? It’s the thread that ties my life together. As a young diplomat, I worked on the Hong Kong negotiations in the early 1980s, the two-plus-four talks on German unification, and the CDE and CSCE processes in the Soviet Union in between.
You’ve picked five diaries and autobiographies, from five characters who all feature in your own book, just published in the US as Hello Goodbye Hello. Why are you so fond of other people’s diaries? I like them because although people can fake diaries I tend to feel that they don’t. And I like the perspective of a diary, in that people don’t know what’s going to happen next. Wartime diaries are especially interesting in that minute-to-minute sense.
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