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A story about high-up civil servants, written in the early 1930s and set in the near future, 1939. More accurately, though, it is about the layers of confusion, bungling, misunderstanding, laziness, fear, pride and vanity that lead Britain into a hideous international crisis and to the brink of war. To begin with, the fuss is about mineral deposits in Iran, which everyone wants a piece of once they begin to realise how valuable they are. Then it spirals into something quite different as rockets are tested, a French government falls and the British foreign secretary starts behaving very oddly indeed. The most fascinating thing about the story is how it dramatises the way human misunderstanding and human fallibility can have a disastrous effect on world affairs. The plotline about western powers scrabbling for resources in the Middle East seems horribly vatic. And of course it is rather uncanny that Nicolson should have written a story in 1932 about world conflict flaring up in 1939. --Charlotte Higgins at www.guardina.co.uk.