When politics and policy clash, politics always win. And in this case, senior diplomat Percy Williamson loses. At odds with Canadas new Minister of Foreign Affairs, George Crowley, Percy draws an overseas assignment as ambassador to Bharalya, a small country in Asia that recently discovered a big cache of oil. When Percy and his wife Marilyn arrive in Bharalya they are quite unprepared for the bizarre experiences they will share and the eccentric people they will meet. Theres the king whos addicted to collecting medals from foreign governments, a junior diplomat who impersonates his own foreign minister, a visiting minister caught by the press in a brothel, and a travel-averse diplomat reduced to jelly by his one and only trip outside the capital. Diplomatic conflicts almost turn into wars over golf tournaments, and Percys and Marilyns duties include attending flower competitions, Christmas parties, national day celebrations, and events with rented camels. And regularly erupting at the most awkward moments is the dreaded Bharali amoeba, scourge of the diplomatic intestinal tract. But all frivolity is set aside when the government threatens to close down the embassy; the Foreign Service springs into action, with surprising results.

"In this book of extraordinary journeys and epochal encounters, Jonathan Wright traces the ambassadors' story from Ancient Greece and Ashoka's empire in India to the European Enlightenment and the birth of the nation state. He shows us Byzantine envoys dining with Attila the Hun, thirteenth-century monks journeying from Flanders to the Asian steppe, and Tudor ambassadors grappling with the chaos of Reformation. He examines the rituals and institutions of diplomacy, asking - for instance - why it was felt necessary to send an elephant from Baghdad to Aachen in 801 A.D. And he explores diplomacy's dangers, showing us terrified, besieged ambassadors surviving on horsemeat and champagne in 1900s Beijing."--BOOK JACKET.

A distinct symbol of the desert and the Middle East, the camel was once unkindly described as “half snake, half folding bedstead.” But in the eyes of many the camel is a creature of great beauty. This is most evident in the Arab world, where the camel has played a central role in the historical development of Arabic society—where an elaborate vocabulary and extensive literature have been devoted to it. In Camel, Robert Irwin explores why the camel has fascinated so many cultures, including those cultivated in locales where camels are not indigenous. Here, he traces the history of the camel from its origins millions of years ago to the present day, discussing such matters of contemporary concern as the plight of camel herders in Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region, the alarming increase in the population of feral camels in Australia, and the endangered status of the wild Bactrian in Mongolia and China. Throughout history, the camel has been appreciated worldwide for its practicality, resilience, and legendary abilities of survival. As a result it has been featured in the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Poussin, Tiepolo, Flaubert, Kipling, and Rose Macaulay, among others. From East to West, Irwin’s Camel is the first survey of its kind to examine the animal’s role in society and history throughout the world. Not just for camel aficionados, this highly illustrated book, containing over 100 informative and unusual images, is sure to entertain and inform anyone interested in this fascinating and exotic animal.

The Ambassadors is a 1903 novel by Henry James, originally published as a serial in the North American Review (NAR). This dark comedy, seen as one of the masterpieces of James's final period, follows the trip of protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether to Europe in pursuit of Chad Newsome, his widowed fiancée's supposedly wayward son; he is to bring the young man back to the family business, but he encounters unexpected complications. The third-person narrative is told exclusively from Strether's point of view.

The Commentaries is the first complete English language translation, with complete annotations, of a unique and extraordinary memoir from the pen of the erudite Spanish soldier-diplomat D. García de Silva y Figueroa over the course of his embassy to Persia (1614–1624). The Commentaries transcend the travel-literature genre, emerging as a precocious European intellectual global history that is remarkable for its encyclopedic breadth, its historical depth, and its ethnographic and even artistic sensitivity. The Commentaries will be of interest to historians, ethnographers, and literary critics, or anyone with an interest in early modern European accounts of the encounter between the Portuguese and Spanish Empires and Safavid Persia during the early modern period.