How to be Perfidious

DIPLOMACY--Harold Nicolson--Harcourt, Brace ($2).

Intriguing European diplomats have long regarded their phlegmatic British rivals as men of diabolic cunning. They compress their admiration and envy into the epithet, perfidious Albion. Even Heinrich Heine warned against "the treacherous and murderous intrigues of those Carthaginians of the North Sea." Writer-Diplomat Harold Nicolson in his Diplomacy, published last fortnight, says British diplomats seem "treacherous" because they are amateurish, opportunist, childishly simple, sentimental. Salient traits of British diplomacy to Author Nicolson are a "national distaste for logic and a national preference for dealing with situations after they have arisen rather than before they arise."

Intended as a standard handbook on diplomatic theory, procedure and preparation of novices for the foreign service, Diplomacy is clearly, suavely, concisely written, with scarcely a dash of famed Nicolson irony to spice its correct Protocole. Its brief, packed 264 pages review diplomatic practice from the moment when cavemen first thought it would be a good idea to have an immune messenger to call time-out in their club fights, down to the present when "total warriors" tend to think diplomatic immunity is oldfashioned.

The Author. Uncle of chubby, cherubic-looking Harold Nicolson's was Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, Viscount Clandeboye and Earl of Dufferin and Earl of Ava, P.C., K.P., G.C.B., G.C.S.I., G.C.M.G., G.C.I.E., D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S. He added Egypt and Burma to the British Empire. Harold Nicolson's father was Sir Arthur Nicolson, Baron Carnock, of Carnock, British diplomat in such outposts as Teheran (where Child Harold was born), Constantinople and Vienna. When, after 20 years of foreign service, Harold Nicolson renounced diplomacy for authoring, he wrote overtly laudatory, covertly ironical lives of his uncle and father, Lord Curzon and U. S. Financier-Diplomat Dwight W. Morrow.

Author Nicolson's sly habit of poking polite fun at pomposity while paying his respects to pompous bigwigs, made many people wonder just how well Author Nicolson and Diplomat Nicolson got along together. Diplomacy leaves little doubt that Author Nicolson takes Diplomat Nicolson very seriously, that though Author Nicolson resigned from the Foreign Affairs Committee in disagreement with Prime Minister Chamberlain after Munich, Diplomat Nicolson has by no means given up Cabinet hopes.

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