NOBODY TOLD ME HOW: A Diplomatic Entertainment

Mira Michal was a journalist covering the United Nations at Lake Success when she met her future husband. A year later she found herself an ambassadress at the Court of St. James, coping with royal occasions, protocol, and domestic arrangements on the plenipotentiary scale. She is an amusing raconteur of diplomatic life in London and, later, back in New York with the UN. Her book is distinguished from the usual accounts in two ways. While her tone is frivolous and flippant throughout, she avoids the cuteness which is frequently the pitfall for this sort of writing. Secondly, and one mentions it as an afterthought because it is entirely incidental to the book, both the author and her husband are Polish, but, there is not one hint of the Cold War in these pages. A succession of eccentric servants and two growing boys, with various pets, kept their household lively even without the diplomatic complications. Parts of this droll and good-humored book have appeared previously in Harper's, Vogue, and the Virginia Quarterly.