Highly personal memoirs by Irish diplomats are rare, and those with the quality of fictional autobiography by George Moore, Brendan Behan and Francis Stuart are rarer still. These remarkable reminisces of a man who served his country in Germany and Italy during the first two decades of Irelands independence tell the story of an exotic individual cast by the oddest circumstances into a minor role on the world stage. Writing with mordant detail in this artfully constructed narrative, Bewley moves from set-piece accounts of 1916 Dublin, the 1923 Congress of the Irish Race in Paris, the 132 International Eucharistic Congress and the Nuremburg Rally of 1933, go revealing portraits of Eamon de Valera, Sir Neville Henderson and his colleagues in the Diplomatic Corps, and sketches of life among the facist elite of Hitlers Third Reich.