In this entertaining & engaging memoir former ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles lifts the lid on embassy life throughout the world. For over thirty years Sherard Cowper-Coles was on the diplomatic front line in a distinguished career that took him from the corridors of power in Whitehall to a string of high-profile around the world. Entering the Foreign Office in 1977 he took up postings in Beirut Alexandria & Cairo Washington Paris & Hong Kong his globe-trotting punctuated with spells in London where the young diplomat had a baptism of fire writing foreign affairs speeches for Geoffrey Howe & Margaret Thatcher. In 1999 under the New Labour government & Prime Minister Tony Blair he was made Principal Private Secretary to the irascible Foreign Secretary Robin Cook providing the book with some of its most hilarious sequences. His career culminated in a succession of ambassadorial posts as Our Man in Israel Saudi Arabia & finally Afghanistan. Ever the Diplomat is his revealing & witty account of half a lifetime in diplomacy.