For almost 80 years the distinguished profile of Sir Edward Grey has looked on as the great and the good have made their way in and out of the ‘Ambassador’s Entrance’ of the Foreign Office. But how did this memorial …
1 December 2015 marks the 90th anniversary of the formal signing of the Locarno Treaties at the Foreign Office in London. Named after the town in Switzerland where the treaties had been negotiated a few months earlier, their aim was …
In the early hours of Tuesday, 12 October 1915, Edith Cavell, a British nurse who had been working in Belgium, was executed by the Germans after being found guilty of helping over 200 Allied servicemen escape to England. At her …
The historian John Ehrman, who wrote an account of the atomic bomb and British policy based on privileged access to government records, wrote in 1953 that there were five questions that needed to be asked about the dropping of atomic …
There are various departments within the civil service which were, you could say, family affairs. The Foreign Office was undoubtedly the department in which this practice was the most spread. Appointments to the diplomatic service were often based upon recommendations and who …
The Battle for Berlin, April to May 1945 The image of the hoisting of the Red Flag over the Reichstag 2 May 1945 has come to represent the ‘total victory’ of Soviet Russia over Nazi Germany in the Second World …
In June 1850 the House of Commons began what A. J. P. Taylor would later describe as ‘the greatest debate on the principles of foreign policy in our parliamentary records’. The challenges facing Britain in the middle of the nineteenth …
The Yalta Myth Between 4 and 11 February 1945, while the Second World War still raged both in Europe and in the Far East, the ‘Big Three’—Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill—met at the Black Sea resort of Yalta, supported by large …
The Colonial Office and the Foreign Office have very distinct histories. The British Colonies were initially administered jointly by the Secretary of State for War, and the Board of Trade, who were focused on their own interests, not necessarily the Colonies themselves. From 1795 all …
I stood in the square talking to East Germans and asked them what they were going to buy. They said first of all, Südfrüchte . . . tropical fruit, a very understandable thing because they didn’t have nearly as much …