Percy Cradock, In Pursuit of British Interest: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. London, 1997. From the review by John Vincent in the Spectator, 6 September 1997, pp. 32-34.
'In this record of [diplomatic] success, […] there was one stark exception: Herr Kohl. It was not that Lady Thatcher, for all her economy in the social arts, could not make herself agreeable when occasion demanded - that she rarely failed to do. With Herr Kohl, she failed utterly, at every level: in terms of personal chemistry, despite a common wartime provincialism, but still more in terms of a failure of sympathy over reunification. Personalities apart, she only embodied the normal British view, then and now, that though we supported reunification in principle there was no need to hasten matters. This represented a general failure in British understanding of Germany, of what unity meant to Germans (until it happened), and, worse perhaps, of what unity meant to Washington. Isolation in Europe was perhaps bearable; isolation from Washington in addition was certainly not.
'And yet how could we not fail in sympathy for Germany? We never went to Germany, except as squaddies. We had no German gîtes. The idea of our élite holidaying in a German version of Chiantishire was unthinkable. No one went there on 'gap years'. Our schools barely taught German: German authors were closed books to us. We did business with Germans - in English. We often thought of them - in images of the second world war. We made no attempt to understand their experiences and their recovery. They were the far side of a mental Berlin Wall, and a price is being paid.'