The author has been successively journalist, official of the Israel Government, and university lecturer in politics. Throughout, his special interests and activities have been in the sphere of international affairs and it was while teaching International Relations at the University of Sussex that he wrote this book. He combines the experience of one who has seen the policy being made from the inside with the theoretical insight of the political scientist; he assesses with a sympathetic but unemotional detachment the constraints on the formation of British foreign policy.