ABSTRACT
Former diplomat Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles describes the influence a classical education had on him and his contemporaries in HM Diplomatic Service. He gives several examples of the way classical learning and allusions were deployed in his experience of diplomatic life. He mentions the importance of historians such as Thucydides in understanding the sweep of history, and the foundation that knowledge of Greco-Roman civilisation gave a diplomat following a career focused on the Middle East.
