Maisky’s Diaries, for all their observational panache, are in many ways a record of professional failure. He did not succeed in persuading the Western allies to join a Soviet-sponsored policy of “collective security” after 1935. He did not succeed in securing Anglo-Soviet military cooperation in the summer of 1939. He did not succeed in cajoling Britain and America to open a second front in Europe, either in 1942 or 1943. Yet he was eventually recalled less for his shortcomings than for his success. Stalin could not abide the possibility of so popular an envoy in London. This could have been disastrous for Maisky. But he survived. He even survived his subsequent disgrace, in 1955.  He died in his bed, aged 91, in 1975. Maisky was not a nice, still less a good, man. Read his account of the Soviet invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939 and feel your blood run cold. Yet one cannot help but admire him.  Legend has it that Talleyrand, on being asked what he had done during the French Revolution, simply replied, “J’ai survécu.”  Maisky might have said much the same. And his was surely the tougher task.