Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives

Description

From the first exploratory expeditions into foreign lands, through the heyday of the British Empire and still at the end of the millennium, the foreign service has been shaped and run behind the scenes by the wives of ambassadors and minor civil servants. Accompanying their spouses in the most extraordinary, tough, sometimes terrifying circumstances, they have struggled to bring their civilization with them. Their stories - from ambassadresses downwards - are a feast of eccentricity, genuine hardship and genuine heroism.

Katie Hickman was born into a diplomatic family and has spent more than twenty-five years living abroad in Europe, the Far East and Latin America. She is the author of four previous books: the bestselling Daughters of Britannia: the Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives; A Trip to the Light Fantastic (reissued as Travels With A Circus), which was one of the Independent's 1993 Books of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; The Quetzal Summer, a novel set in the Andes, for which she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award; and Dreams of the Peaceful Dragon: A Journey into Bhutan. She is featured in the Oxford University Press guide to women travellers, Wayward Women.

Her last book, A Trip to the Light Fantastic, received extraordinarily good reviews: 'The most ambitiously imaginative sort of travel writing' - Patrick Skene Catling 'Magic is at the heart of Hickman's narrative. Her characters would not seem out of place in the oeuvre of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende' - Sunday Times 'Mexico will not have been portrayed more vividly since Graham Greene's The Lawless Roads... Enchanting' - Geoffrey Moorhouse, Daily Telegraph