On Her Majesty's Diplomatic Service : From the Arab World to the Berlin Wall

'You're good at languages. You go into the Diplomatic', pronounced the father of the teenage Michael Burton. And so began a diplomatic career that ranged from Khartoum to the Khyber Pass, taking in service in the Gulf, Paris, Berlin and, as British Ambassador, in a post from which the Foreign Office had barred him twenty-eight years earlier.