[.ca] The Siren Years: A Canadian Diplomat Abroad 1937-1945 (ISBN 077107526X)

Amazon.ca:
A legendary diplomat and one of Canada's few acclaimed diarists, Charles Ritchie carried on a wartime affair with novelist Elizabeth Bowen, hobnobbed with the likes of Queen Elizabeth II and Vincent Massey, and put it all down on paper with wit and a sardonic eye for human foibles. The Siren Years is the most acclaimed of Ritchie's four volumes of diaries. Republished in 2001, the series caused a sensation in Canadian letters when it first came out in 1974, winning the Governor General's Award for non-fiction. The Halifax-born Ritchie entered the diplomatic corps in its nascent years in the mid-1930s and capped a 37-year career with postings as Canada's ambassador to West Germany and the U.S. and permanent representative to the United Nations. His account of life as a diplomat in London during the Blitz is particularly enthralling, jumping whimsically from descriptions of the terror of the bombing raids to salon gossip about the politicians of the period and the scions of English society. Ritchie was a low-ranking private secretary to Massey, Canada's wartime High Commissioner in London and future Governor General, and it puzzled many that he managed to become intimate with England's social elite. He stayed at Miriam Rothschild's estate, spent Christmas with the Duchess of Westminster, and lunched with writer Nancy Mitford and political hostess Margot Asquith at the Ritz and Claridge's. In The Siren Years Ritchie comes across as good-hearted and irreverent and offers entertaining descriptions of some well-known political figures. Mackenzie King is a "fat, little conjurer with his flickering, shifty eyes," while Harry Truman "looks like a sparrowy, little, old, small-town, American housewife who could shut the door very firmly in the face of traveling salesmen and tramps." It is a first-rate memoir, a well-written rendering of history and society from an insider's perspective. --Alex Roslin

Amazon.ca Canadian Essential:
Encouraged by the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, longtime Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie released his wartime journals after his retirement in 1974, and in that volume and the three that followed, he established himself as the greatest of Canadian diarists. Witty and well-connected, Ritchie brings a novelist's eye to the drama and humour of London at war and to the powerful and famous figures he sketches with insight and style.