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Diplomacy has never enjoyed a wholly favourable reputation. Often confused with its clandestine cousin, espionage, it has for centuries been associated with deviousness and duplicity. Only the other day, when I was giving a talk, a woman came up to me afterwards and expressed astonishment that I had actually given straight answers to questions. “I expected”, she said, “the usual wishy-washy that you get from diplomats.” In modern times, diplomacy has also become associated with appeasement of one kind or another, with kowtowing to foreign governments.

These criticisms have acquired the rancid flavour of class warfare, a deeply ingrained British pastime. For centuries, diplomacy recruited from the aristocracy and upper classes. When I joined the Foreign Office in 1966, recruitment had become more widely meritocratic; but it was overwhelmingly a male meritocracy drawn from a few elite universities. Today, the recruitment pool is vastly bigger in every way. But, the old myths persist. The image of a diplomat clad in pinstripes, quaffing champagne, and leading the good life in a magnificent embassy, dies hard.

Christopher Meyer. Getting Our Way: 500 Years of Adventure and Intrigue: the Inside Story of British Diplomacy. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009, p. 6 (adapted ).

Decide whether the following statements are right or wrong according to text.

For the author, the bad reputation diplomacy holds has to do with the frequent international negotiations in which diplomats deal with foreign officials.