Ebook: Friends, Foes and Foreigners

FROM his rich experience of European life and politics in this century, Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart has drawn several volumes of lively and illuminating reminiscence, from "Memoirs of a British Agent" to "Your England". Those books all described scenes and events with which he had been personally concerned, sometimes as a witness, sometimes centrally.

Now shifting his focus, he examines the records and careers of a score of contemporaries: some famous, like Lord Beaverbrook; some little known; some infamous, like Zdenek Fierlinger. In each case he recounts an episode that has seemed significant of the part his subject has played: and in this examination of the influence of personalities, he once again shows his own penetrating insight into the development of the politics and culture of our time.

His brilliant reporting of sporting events is again also demonstrated, in his portraits of the great rugger players, Barrington Ward and Moir Mackenzie, and of the boxing champion Bob Fitzsimmons. Kerensky, Robert Sherwood, Tamara Karsavina, Compton Mackenzie, Lord Bracken are typical of the wide range of friends of whom he has stories to tell--not always entirely creditable, sometimes ironic, but always genial and witty.