Description
Lilliput Press, 1989, Hardback
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 reminiscences of a man who served his country in Germany and Italy during the first two decades of Ireland’s 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 132nd International Eucharistic Congress and the Nuremburg Rally of 1933, to revealing portraits of Eamon de Valera, Sir Neville Henderson and his colleagues in the Diplomatic Corps, and sketches of life among the fascist elite of Hitler’s Third Reich.
‘Should not be considered a wholly reliable source… records a personalised and sanitised portrait of his time in Nazi Germany, with coverage of waning aristocrats and rising Nazis. Although Bewley toned down his virulent anti-Semitism, he wrote in withering terms about his colleagues in the Irish diplomatic service and about his minister, de Valera’. Cambridge Dictionary of Irish Biography
CHARLES HENRY BEWLEY was born in Dublin in 1888 and died in Rome in 1969. In addition to this posthumous autobiography he is author of two published works, Ladies and Gentlemen (Berlin 1944), a volume of satirical short stories, and Herman Goering and the Third Reich (Berlin 1956, New York 1962), a biography.
