Book review: Naked Diplomacy: Power and Statecraft in the Digital Age by Tom Fletcher

William Collins, £18.99

“Diplomacy is Darwinian: its practitioners need to evolve to survive.” This is the first line of Tom Fletcher’s excellent new book on diplomacy—or perhaps more correctly “statecraft.”

Fletcher was a British diplomat for many years serving as ambassador in Lebanon between 2011 and 2015. Early on in the book, he describes the evolution of his career: “When I started, we had to consider how policy would look on the Sky News ticker at the bottom of the screen: 140 words,” he writes. “By the time I left, we were…