ABSTRACT
Over half a century of his work with the Institute of Pacific Relations and Pacific Affairs, half a century of endeavours to expand the quotient of rationality in Asian international relations – Bill Holland has shown the true editor’s and research promoter’s encyclopaedic catholicity of interests. But one theme has always caught his attention, as I was reminded the last time we met by his enthusiastic commendation of Christopher Thome’s Allies of a Kind: the interplay, in the determination of national policies, between interest, ideology and national self-consciousness. For the last of the IPR conferences, at Lucknow in 1950 – before he got caught up in the protracted struggle for the survival of the IPR against one of the more bizarrely pathological manifestations of that interplay – he planned and edited a series of papers on nationalism in the Pacific.
