Sir Ivor Roberts, currently serving as the president of Trinity College at Oxford University, worked in the British diplomatic service for nearly 40 years, including a stint as deputy chief of the Foreign Office's Press Department and later its head of counterterrorism. He was the British ambassador to Belgrade during the Bosnian civil war and the subsequent Kosovo conflict. But his writing and story-telling skills do not match his diplomatic acumen. Roberts's wooden style makes Conversations with Milosevic read like a bureaucratic document. Although Slobodan Milosevic (widely known as the "Butcher of the Balkans") and some of his henchmen inspired and perpetrated some of the worst communal violence in Europe since World War II, Roberts turns them into cardboard characters. Milosevic comes across as merely an ordinary foreign leader using negotiations to protect and advance national interests.
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