Addis Ababa in the days of my ascendancy was a city built of spies. My home was ruled by an Emperor, the great and some say divine Haile Selassie, who saw himself I would swear not as the god the Rastafari would make him, but the bridge his nation must cross to go from a timeless and superstitious past to an accelerating future. He aspired, though, to at least one divine attribute, which was omniscience. Ethiopia traditionally teemed with plots, and the capital above all, as must any imperial court where the power of life and death is vested in the whim of a potentate, and our practice of intrigue is one which goes back thousands of years, so that we are better practised at it and more in the habit than almost any other nation in the world. This, in the middle of the twentieth century, took the form of resistance to Haile Selassie’s upheavals and modernisations—which were many and discomforting to the service aristocracy that he notionally ruled—or an urgent desire he should hurry up and do more of them, harder, faster, louder. Oh, he was a hero, and had fought his way back, after the accursèd Fascist invasion, at the head of an army. He was beloved of Winston Churchill and later of the citizens of the United States—but at home, just as he had gouged and politicked his way to the crown, so those under him constantly sought promotion, because only in promotion was there any sort of security to be had in Addis Ababa. Security, indeed, was his obsession also, both for his realm, and for himself. In the arena of statecraft he chose to dance between the raindrops of America and Russia, but in his personal power he was less bending. He was the Emperor, and let none doubt that his rule was absolute.