F.O.
READ The World's Gamei by Hugh Thomas (Eyre and Spottiswoode, I5s.), for three reasons. For its charming love story which grows with as little effort, and bursts with as little pain, as a soap- bubble. For an extremely interesting account of how the Foreign Office goes about its daily busi- ness. And for its good-humoured complaint that civil servant, if they are to succeed professionally, must not allow themselves to become emotion- ally involved in their work. It is only the last of these three themes that goes slightly astray. A Foreign Secretary needs a calculating machine at his elbow as much as he needs a telephone, and it is far more important that the machine should calculate accurately than that it should mind being thought desiccated. A civil servant has to have two personalities, a public and a private one, and he changes one into the other in his bath, like a schoolmaster, a surgeon or an adjutant. What Mr. Thomas really resents is not so much the inhuman objectivity of the Civil Service as the numbing and very English distinc- tion between on and off parade. He and his Third Secretary hero, Simon Smith, are too companion- able to enjoy discipline, and Hugh Thomas the novelist takes so much pleasure in the flirtation between Simon and his boss's wife Laura that he avoids disfiguring it by anything so mean as
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