Abstract
At first blush this looks like one of those run-of-the-mill coffee-table books published just for the Christmas market -- expensively produced, replete with beautiful photographs, a text as undemanding as the tinkling notes of a cocktail-bar pianist, and the whole thing massively heavy. Sleep is impossible... rats run about behind the wainscoating [sic] when they are not actually galloping through the ballroom...After a sleepless night, when I tried to leave my bedroom, I could not get out, as the door had jammed during the damp night. In my day, which embraced two postings to Moscow in the Soviet era, most of the embassy offices were housed in the same building, so that the ambassador lived above the shop. [...]as Stourton recounts, Margaret Thatcher extracted security of tenure from Mikhail Gorbachev, we lived a somewhat precarious existence on annually renewed leases.