The World: Eden: The Loyal Adjutant

His life spanned some of the most glorious years of modern British history and some of the most traumatic—from the empire's pinnacle at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, through two devastating wars, to the humiliating retreat from Suez in 1956 and the prospect of devolution at home. For three decades he was a highly visible, thoroughly photogenic presence at international conferences, almost boyishly handsome even in middle age. Sartorially splendid in the Savile Row tradition, he looked and talked like an MGM image of a British diplomat. But his long career in politics and foreign policy involved problems of substance more...

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