Word: palmerston
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Cyprus problem last week was beginning to resemble the famous Schleswig-Holstein question, which agitated Europe for nearly 100 years and caused at least four wars. Of this knotty diplomatic tangle, Britain's Lord Palmerston said, "Only three men have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead; the second was a German professor who went mad. I am the third, and I have forgotten all about it." Forceful Tampering. Diplomats at the U.N. would be equally happy to forget all about the Cyprus problem, which last week was returned to the Security Council after U Thant...
...fact, the Foreign Office was a Whitehall elephant almost from the day it opened in 1868. It was modeled on a Venetian palazzo, after Architect Sir Gilbert Scott's original Gothic façade was indignantly rejected by Prime Minister Lord Palmerston as "admirable for a monastery." (It later made an admirable Gothic railway station.) From a pompous exterior decked with 63 allegorical statues to regal suites designed more for la dolce vita than diplomacy, the building was so wildly inappropriate that within ten years after completion it was roundly condemned by a parliamentary commission...
Until the late 19th century, the main qualifications for a Foreign Office job were a good family, a smattering of languages, and big, clear handwriting. During Lord Palmerston's 16 years as Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, state papers were constantly returned from 10 Downing Street with testy quibbles on the writer's grammar or his handwriting, which, Palmerston insisted, should slope forward, not backward "like the raking masts of an American schooner...
...monopoly with China and, with the aid of a heavily armed clipper fleet, won for themselves 25% of the illegal but vastly profitable opium trade. In 1839, when the Manchu Emperor seized 20,000 chests of smuggled British opium, it was William Jardine who convinced British Foreign Minister Lord Palmerston that this was an indignity to which Britain could not submit. The result was the three-year Opium War, which ended in 1842 with permanent Chinese cession of Hong Kong to Britain...