Books: Diplomat, Old Style*

PORTRAIT OF A DIPLOMATIST—Harold Nicolson—Houghton Mifflin ($5).

In the dear dead days before the present millennium had set in, diplomacy was secret, diplomats secretive and suave. The late Sir Arthur Nicolson (1849-1928), onetime English Ambassador to the Sublime Porte (Constantinople), to Madrid, to St. Petersburg, onetime Permanent Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, is the subject of his son Harold Nicolson's excellent biography. Son Harold, approving the manners but not the machinations of pre-War diplomats, considers his father "an admirable example for the study of the old diplomacy at its best. . . ....