Memoirs of a Wild Goose

Highly personal memoirs by Irish diplomats are rare, and those with the quality of fictional autobiography by George Moore, Brendan Behan and Francis Stuart are rarer still. These remarkable reminisces of Charles Bewley, a man who served his country in Germany and Italy during the first two decades of Ireland’s independence tell the story of ‘an exotic individual cast by the oddest circumstances into a minor role on the world stage’.

Writing with mordant detail in this artfully constructed narrative, Charles Bewley moves from set-piece accounts of 1916 Dublin, the 1923 Congress of the Irish Race in Paris, the 132 International Eucharistic Congress and the Nuremburg Rally of 1933, go revealing portraits of Eamon de Valera, Sir Neville Henderson and his colleagues in the Diplomatic Corps, and sketches of life among the facist elite of Hitler’s Third Reich.