First edition, first printing. 226pp, with black and white illustrations. Red cloth-covered boards with gilt titles to spine. 8vo. Cloth just a rounded at corners and spine ends. Text block edges dull and spotted. Some spotting on endpapers else internally neat and clean. In its original shelf worn dust wrapper, rubbed and chipped at edges and on folds of a sunned spin.
The memoirs of Sir Lancelot Oliphant, a Foreign Office diplomat who over the course of a forty year plus career saw service all over the world but by far the vast majority of the volume is concerned with his experiences as Ambassador to Belgium and Minister to Luxembourg from November 1939. Soon German troops were amassing on the Luxemburg border. In May 1940 events moved swiftly and, in the chaos that resulted, the Belgium Government relocated from town to town, with the Ambassador accompanying it until, during a crossing to France, he lost contact. The Ambassador was reported missing. Captured by the Nazis and stripped of his diplomatic immunity he was shunted under escort to Cologne and then Berlin where he was interrogated by the Gestapo before sixteen months of internment. His memoirs then give a fascinating insight into the workings, and delusions, of the upper echelons of the Third Reich as well as their lowest conditions.
