Letter
To Turn One’s Plate
10 August 2023
Tom Stevenson’s survey of diplomacy’s ‘smell of flintlock … and a certain glamour’ called to mind my stint at the end of the 1980s as English editor and language dogsbody at a Japanese embassy to a kingdom I shall leave nameless (LRB, 10 August). My editorial high point was to give the nod, on the death of Emperor Hirohito, to a notice for release to the newspapers, carefully worded by...