Foreign affairs and diplomacy
In March 1962 a secret report landed on the desks of senior officials in the Foreign Office. Written by Foreign Office Historian Rohan Butler it was a forensic and critical account of the loss in 1951 of Britain’s single biggest …
Professor Jonathan Conlin of The Lausanne Project explains how that "most superior person" (as he was described by contemporaries at Oxford) met his match at Lausanne 100 years ago. Of all the treaties negotiated in the wake of World War 1, …
We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it. “This thing” as British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin put it, was the Atomic Bomb. Bevin was quoted …
The most that we can say is that we have made the best of a bad bargain, not that we have got a fair deal (Prime Minister Edward Heath, 1 September 1971) Fifty years ago, Ambassadors representing the 4 Occupying …
The principles set out in the Atlantic Charter eighty years ago remain key to the global vision shared by the UK and US. But its terms also contained the roots of international tensions that persist today: for example in relation …
Sixty years ago simmering Cold-War tensions were dramatically brought to a head in Berlin. A new volume of documents from the FCDO Historians tells how Britain responded to the crisis brought about by the construction of the Berlin Wall. In the …
Now, at this sad and breathless moment, we are plunged in the hunger and distress which are the aftermath of our stupendous struggle. Though no longer Prime Minister, Winston Churchill’s speech at Fulton on 5 March 1946 packed a formidable …
This war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution of last century. . . . Not a single principle in the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six …
The American Congress and the American people have never accepted any literal principle of equal sacrifice, financial or otherwise, between all the allied participants. Indeed, have we ourselves? Lord Keynes, defending the Agreement in the House of Lords, 18 December …
To mark the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, 45 years ago this month, FCO Historians look back to where it all began – the CSCE preparatory talks.