Canada to the Rescue

In September 2015, United States president Barack Obama, on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly, presided over a meeting of 50 or so countries determined to reinforce the UN’s capacity to mount effective peace operations. If they deliver, the outcome could prove a major boost to the UN’s overstretched 120,000 or so peacekeepers.

Lester B. Pearson would have approved.

Antony Anderson, a broadcast producer and writer, has written a volume centred on Pearson’s manoeuvres in 1956 to rescue London from its folly in the Suez crisis. Having never pulled off the documentary he had hoped to draw from this episode of diplomatic history, Anderson has turned the extensive research he carried out into book form.

Too much of The Diplomat: Lester Pearson and the Suez Crisis is given over to Pearson’s early life, a charmed one dominated by a youthful passion for sports and great academic facility. After joining Canada’s young foreign...