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Diplomatic Baggage

On sale

30th January 2006

Price: £10.99

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Selected: Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780719567261

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When Sunday Times fashion journalist Brigid Keenan married the love of her life in the late Sixties, little idea did she have of the rollercoaster journey they would make around the world together – with most things going horribly awry while being obliged to keep the straightest face and put their best feet forward.

For he was a diplomat – and Brigid found herself the smiling face of the European Union in locales ranging from Kazakhstan to Trinidad. Finding herself miserable for the first time in a career into which many would have long ago thrown the towel, she found herself asking (during a farewell party for the Papal Nuncio): was it worth it?

As this stream of it-really-happened-to-me stories shows, it most certainly was – if only for our vicarious bewilderment at how exactly you throw a buffet dinner during a public mourning period in Syria, remain viable as a fashion journalist when taste-wise you are three seasons out of it and geographically a world away, make people believe that there are actually terrible things going on in paradise, be a good mother AND save some of the finest architecture in Damascus and Brussels from demolition – seemingly all simultaneously.

Reviews

Joanna Lumley
Brigid writes like a dream ... fabulous
Josceline Dimbleby
Brigid Keenan vividly evokes both the oddities and loneliness, even today, of being the "other half" of a diplomat. Immediate and intimate, poignant and very funny; it is as if she is talking to the reader. Her eagle-eyed observation of human behaviour and far flung experiences made me laugh out loud.
Katie Hickman, Sunday Times
A wonderful picaresque take on the travails of expat life, and an absolutely delicious read ... There are not many books that have actually made me cry from laughing, but this is one of them
Shirley Conran
Life is what you make of it -- you can't just sit there and let it happen to you -- you've got to grab opportunities with both hands, or you risk boredom at least, depression and deathbed regrets at worst. Women have not been raised to understand the importance of this. Brigid Keenan rams the message home with hilarity. This is an important book, written by a very funny writer.
William Dalrymple
I found myself laughing out loud three or four times a page. Quite unlike anything else I have read: sad, touching, honest and observant.
Bookseller
Bridget Jones' mother meets Katie Hickman's Daughters of Britannia ... I've a hunch this is going to do very well.
Publishing News
The verve, the fun and the disasters of a life spent trekking round the world is vividly conveyed.
Mail on Sunday
Thirty years of far-flung postings later, she has acquired enough farcical experiences to make this memoir irresistible.
Country Life
She is consistently herself, an observant journalist with a beady eye for local eccentricities ... Life with Brigid Keenan could never be boring.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
The story sparkles, flies, delights. You love Keenan, the weepy, flighty, funny bit of diplomatic baggage but a part of your heart goes out to AW, her partner, who puts up and shuts up. But what makes this book special is how with a light touch Keenan exposes the dark corners, the frustrations, the dilemmas of those who go forth to represent their country. The grand houses and lifestyles hide so much, silence so many. But not Bridget Keenan.
Vogue
Vogue loves ... Diplomatic Baggage
Christopher Matthew, author of <i>Now We are Sixty
There are a handful of books I should dearly love to have written myself, and this is one of them. By the end, I felt as if I had lived a whole new life in an unfamiliar and wondrous world that lies somewhere between that of Arthur Grimble's Pattern of Islands and Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals. Like all the best memoirs, Brigid's book is endlessly engaging, full of delightful details, very funny and sometimes rather sad.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
The story sparkles, flies, delights.
Mary S Lovell, author of <i>The Mitford Girls</i>
I am furious! Fancy sending me Bridge's book when I'm so busy. I've just spent three whole hours chortling, giggling and wheezing my way through it - and nary a pot washed or a keyboard key pressed all morning! Very few books these days make me laugh out loud - this one provoked loud hoots at the rate of three per page. It's the funniest thing I've read since Jilly Cooper stopped writing properly and turned to sex and four-letter words. If this isn't a runaway best-seller I'll run away myself and live in Kazakhstan.
Irma Kurtz, <i>Cosmopolitan</i> agony aunt
What fun! Brigid Keenan, has written these anecdotal memoirs with a seasoning of undiplomatic mischief that is beguiling and unexpected in the wife of a peripatetic diplomat. Even in postings as remote and unlikely as Kazakhastan, or as bland and unpromising as Belgium, Keenan is incapable of boredom and therefore, she cannot be boring. Particularly, her delight in the antiquities of the Middle East and the old city of Damascus is knowledgeable and infectious. She is the person you hope will be seated next to you at a dinner party: a companion of experience, vivacity and charm. To read her book is to meet her and to meet her is to be enthralled.
Christopher Matthew, author of <i>Now We Are Sixty
Brigid's book is endlessly engaging, full of delightful details, very funny and sometimes rather sad.
Mary S Lovell, author of <i>The Mitford Girls</i>
It's the funniest thing I've read since Jilly Cooper stopped writing properly and turned to sex and four-letter words.
Lesley Garner, author of <i>How to Survive as a Wo
Brigid may have sobbed her way round the world in her diplomat husband's wake but her reward - and ours - is an inexhaustible stream of ludicrous events and witty observations. Her book has the authentic voice of a born storyteller and a very funny writer.
Diplomat
It's possibly the first time the travails of the envoy's family life have been so wittily spelled out.
Times
'Deliciously effervescent.'
Ahdaf Soueif, The Guardian
'Perfect tone ... surprising, astute, brilliantly observed and very human'
Image magazine
A witty, funny, touching book full of riveting anecdotes. Part-memoir, part-manual, part-travelogue, part-diary and wholly delicious ... if this book doesn't leave Brigid Jones in the ha'penny place, I'll eat my furry hat.
Julie Christie
A wonderfully funny, mischievous account of the adventures and travails of a diplomatic "spouse". It really did make me laugh out loud, startling the cat. Brigid Keenan is quite as hilarious a comic invention as Bridget Jones, only she's REAL.
Public Servant
For anyone with an ambition to build a career in the diplomatic corps (this) should be required reading.
Living Abroad Magazine
A must read
Tablet
Dull this book certainly is not!
Traveller
Insightful and extremely entertaining
Music Week
Light-hearted and eminently readable . . . a vivacious and engaging dialogue with the reader . . . She brings to life her experiences by painting vivid images
Orient Express Magazine
Hilarious and engaging . . . an entertaining account which is hard to put down
Writing Magazine
Never let it be said that the life of a diplomat's wife is totally boring . . . a very entertaining book
The Spectator
With a glorious sense of the ridiculous, she depicts herself as a hyperventilating hysteric, who sobs her doom-ridden fantasies into reality.
Publishing News
'Glorious'