Anthony Seldon

The book takes us inside the Foreign Secretary's London home, 1 Carlton Gardens, and his country retreats, Dorneywood and Chevening. We hear tales of the life of ambassadors abroad, where the glittering parties and glamorous living quarters of an ambassador to Paris contrast with the accommodation that might be on offer to an ambassador and his entourage in Berlin or Moscow, and we look at the fascinating clandestine methods by which the Foreign Office communicated with its far-flung empire and embassies abroad. The story of the building is also the story of the struggle between two great architects - George Gilbert Scott, the architect of the Foreign Office itself, and Matthew Digby Wyatt, the architect of the India Office section of the building. Their contrasting styles still define the building today, and are revealed in Kim Sayer's contemporary photographs of the lavish and ornate rooms of the Locarno Suite; the magnificent Grand Staircase with its extraordinary murals; the Foreign Secretary's Room and the beautiful India Office buildings. Along with a wealth of material from the Foreign Office archives, much previously unseen, they combine to make this book both a celebration of the building and its work today and a testament to a time when the Foreign Office was the nerve centre of the world's greatest power.

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