Following The Washington Embassy: British Ambassadors to the United States, 1939–77 (Basingstoke, 2009), we have another volume in the same format. John Young provides a comprehensive introduction that is a veritable tour-de-force. In seventeen pages, Young provides context for the eight detailed essays in a way that leaves nothing out of the extreme complexity of Anglo-French relations from the postwar reconstruction in 1945 to the end of the decade when Britain at last joined the European Economic Community. The subtext in Young's concentrated narrative is that any discussion of Anglo-French relations—including of course the priorities of British Ambassadors in Paris—can only be fruitful if examined in the light of the attitudes toward Europe adopted by the two former great powers from 1945 to 1979.

Both Britain and France were fortunate in having Duff Cooper as the first ambassador in Paris after its liberation in August 1944. Edward Hampshire reminds us of Cooper's essential qualities for the post. He was not only a Francophile but also someone who had, since 1943, when he was appointed the British representative with the French Committee of National Liberation—an ambassador in all but name—enthusiastically undertaken to oil the wheels of the sometimes strained relations between Churchill and de Gaulle. His skills seemed so valuable that when Labour won the General Election of 1945, Ernest Bevin, the new foreign secretary, asked the former Conservative member of Parliament Duff Cooper to stay. After giving the main elements in the historical debate, Hampshire leaves the reader to decide whether Cooper's legacy—mainly in the form of the bilateral Treaty of Dunkirk of 4 March 1947, which went far short of his own vision of a blueprint for an Anglo-European commitment—really put Anglo-French relations on the right footing.

Rogelia Pastor-Castro does not tell us what Cooper's far less flamboyant successor from January 1948, Oliver Harvey, thought of him. He could not really criticize Cooper's policy, because he had consistently participated in its elaboration. Harvey's dispatches described a resurgent France that the Foreign Office did not want to see, and he was accused of drawing a rosy picture: “French public life remains corrupt and self-seeking,” its officials countered in 1949 (49), showing that they understood nothing about France, because these characteristics did no real harm to French economic buoyancy and national self-confidence. Admittedly, the ambassador was less optimistic in his 1950 reports, and he fully understood France's conclusion that its future only lay with supranational integration, devoting his last years in office to asking his superiors to back initiatives like the Schuman Plan.

Gladwyn Jebb had also been involved in Anglo-French relations during and after the war, when he strongly supported the idea of an Anglo-French Treaty at the Foreign Office. When he arrived in Paris in April 1954, the two outstanding problems were the colonial war in French Indochina, which drained military and economic resources, and the vexed question of West German rearmament, linked with the former in that the French army, with its troops in Indochina, would be numerically inferior to the Germans. Christopher Goldsmith argues that in this instance the ambassador was largely bypassed, with Anthony Eden, the prime minister, successfully dealing with the problem himself. Jebb also seems to have been sidetracked in the Anglo-French decision to launch a joint operation on Suez in 1956. For Goldsmith, Jebb's real legacy—besides “raising Britain's profile in France through . . . glittering soirées at the Embassy” (87)—was the way in which he impressed the importance for the United Kingdom of the Common Market agreements of 1957 on his superiors.

“[Pierson] Dixon had the misfortune of being Britain's representative to France [from October 1960] at the moment when de Gaulle decided to pursue his vision of grandeur,” writes James Ellison in the first page of his chapter (91), setting the theme for the rest of it: “a microcosm of the greatest mésentente in Anglo-French relations after 1945” (93). Dixon did not manage to make the general change his mind, but Ellison very convincingly argues that he was able to change that of Whitehall. The next ambassador, Sir D'Arcy Patrick Reilly (1965–68), for his part, had the added misfortune of serving under the “volatile” (132) George Brown. In this chapter, Helen Parr excellently throws light on the impossible position of an ambassador when his foreign secretary does not trust him. Christopher Soames, “not a typical ambassador” (138), from September 1968, is discussed by Daniel Furby and N. Piers Ludlow. His first phase at the embassy is neatly summed up in one sentence: “From the outset . . . British multilateral tactics [to join the European Economic Community] were in potential conflict with Soames' bilateral objective” (144). But, unlike his three predecessors, he had to face de Gaulle for only a short period, and, with the general's resignation and retirement in April 1969, the way was clear for him to mend fences between British and French diplomacy, especially under Heath, from 1970. For Alistair Noble, Sir Edward Tomkins, who succeeded Soames in November 1972, “proved to be the right man in the right place” (162), “steering a steady ship during often testing times” (183)—especially with Wilson's perceived equivocation over “Europe” after 1974. Isabelle Tombs reminds us that Sir Nicholas Henderson “held the three most coveted ambassadorial posts for a British diplomat—Bonn, Paris and Washington—between 1972 and 1982” (187). He was in Paris from March 1975 to March 1979, and “used hospitality as a diplomatic tool” (188) in “adverse conditions” (206), considering the lack of warmth between Giscard and Wilson, followed by Callaghan.

All these biographical essays very usefully complement the monographs on Anglo-French relations as such listed all through the book, and it is to be hoped that the two volumes already offered are only the first in a successful series on all postwar (and why not interwar?) embassies.