REVIEWS

Harold Nicolson reveals the principles of professionalism.

by Nicholas Dungan

Sir Harold George Nicolson KCVO CMG was the product of a patrician Victorian and Edwardian background and upbringing. The son of a future ambassador and the grandson of an admiral, he was born in Persia, where his father, later The Lord Carnock, was chargé d’affaires at the British Embassy….

Charles de Gaulle’s masterpiece on leadership — and himself

by Nicholas Dungan

In the concise canon of genuinely ingenious books on leadership — of which Machiavelli’s The Prince is perhaps the most celebrated and the most cited — Charles de Gaulle’s Le Fil de l’épée [The Edge of the Sword ] can rightly claim pride of place. The work has often 1 been described as the handbook on leadership which the younger scholar-soldier Charles wrote…

Isaiah Berlin brings a philosophical perspective to practical leadership

by Nicholas Dungan

The intellectual production of Sir Isaiah Berlin constitutes so vast and so varied an œuvre that it is not surprising to find, in the compilation of discrete writings gathered together in the book entitled The Sense of Reality, a wide diversity of subjects and ideas. Yet its first two essays, ‘The Sense of Reality’ and ‘Political Judgement’, offer an uncanny…