Brigid Keenan

Brigid Keenan is best known for her best-selling book Diplomatic Baggage (2005), the frequently hilarious account of her gaffes and travails as a ‘trailing spouse’ following her husband in diplomatic postings around the world, continuing in its sequel Packing Up (2014). But her previous career as a successful fashion journalist, as well as the tourist opportunities afforded to her as a diplomat’s wife, have also enabled her to produce other types of books on various subjects. Her shrewd sympathetic observations make them both humane and culturally valuable. Last but not least, as a founding board member and participant in the Palestine Literature Festival from its inception in 2008, she has helped bring international authors and audiences together in events on the West Bank, under often difficult circumstances.

Keenan relished her jobs in fashion journalism during the 1960s, notably for The Sunday Times until 1973, developing influential contacts within the fashion world as well as her longstanding interests in design, fabrics and textiles. Her first book was on Vogue models, The Women We Wanted to Look Like (1977), while  Dior in Vogue (1981) also draws upon the magazine’s photographic archives, to tell the year-by-year story of the life and collections of the French couture designer Christian Dior, starting with ‘The New Look’ in 1947. Amongst Keenan’s descriptions of sumptuous clothes there are some characteristic personal asides, as when she recalls ‘a tussle’, aged 17, with her mother over the most fashionable length of a party dress: ‘I had been taken in a school party to the Dior show the previous winter, and considered myself a fashion expert’.

From cashmere to Kashmir, one might say, as Keenan’s next book was Travels in Kashmir (1989), subtitled ‘a popular history’ of its people, places, and crafts. In it, she refers to herself as ‘one of the last daughters of the British Raj’ (where her father was in the Army), and her Indian childhood as one she ‘longed to rediscover’. Not surprisingly, fabrics are prominent. She outlines the elaborate skills – and wretched living conditions - of the weavers who made Kashmiri shawls, highly prized in Paris and London from the early 19^th century onwards, which she calls ‘probably the most enduring “craze” there has ever been in the fickle world of fashion’. The book itself is a kind of interweaving: of memoirs, anecdotes, details of great houses, palaces and mosques, while its ‘Travellers’ Tales’ are of European pioneer naturalists and tourists. These included the indomitable Honoria Lawrence (a Victorian ‘trailing spouse’) and ‘adventuress’ Mrs Hervey, whose journals recorded her pausing at Anantnag, ‘only long enough to admire the “graceful trellis and lattice work” on the houses’.

Keenan also implies some identification with Isabel Burton, wife of the British Resident in Damascus during 1869-71, remarking that she too ‘fell in love’ with the city during her own residence there for six years from 1993.  Damascus: Hidden Treasures of the Old City (2000) is a large format and beautifully illustrated book (with photographs of private houses and palaces with exquisite decoration features, taken by her friend Tim Beddow). It combines a history of the ancient walled city, its ‘heart and soul’, with stories about its European visitors, amidst the traditional ways of life in its coffee houses, alleyways, bazaars and souks. ‘The Damascene house is always built around a courtyard’, she remarks, fountains ‘designed to cool and delight’ and ‘full of birdsong’. Of course, being written before the current Syrian conflict, this somewhat Arcadian account of what were formerly wealthy merchants’ houses is given extra poignancy, as are her pleas for sympathetic restoration of this magnificent architectural heritage.

Over the course of more than thirty years, her husband’s career took them to Brussels, Nepal, Gambia, the Caribbean, and central Asian republics, all of which provide a fund of anecdotes for Diplomatic Baggage and its recent sequel Packing Up. Highly entertaining (and there is a lot about entertaining) and amusingly indiscreet, both books follow a diary format in recording gaffes, menu disasters, translation errors and myriad difficulties with domestic staff. By her own account, she left the Paris salons to live in a Nepalese hut not much bigger than a chicken shed. While subsequent residences have been rather more grand, she experiences a familiar pattern of stresses – and attachments to people, remarking that ‘I spend the first six months and the last six months of every posting crying’. [The Independent, 13 November 2005]

Packing Up has more serious subjects. Alongside her husband’s final jobs for the European Commission in Kazkhstan and Azerbaijan, she has to deal with a diagnosis of breast cancer and undergo surgery. Other family events occur: her two daughters’ weddings and subsequent dashing to and from London to look after grand-children: ‘I feel like a maypole with my ribbons being tugged by my family in all different directions’. In addition, she relates her experiences during the Palestinian Festival of Literature (or ‘Palfest’), on the West Bank, which she helped set up from 2008 onwards. Authors who she persuaded to appear have included William Dalrymple, Esther Freud, Deborah Moggach, Michael Palin and Roddy Doyle, brought together with Palestinian authors such as Raja Shehadeh and hip-hop poet Suheir Hammad.

Back in Baku, despite some culinary surprises (‘pork with prunes came out more like pork in porridge’), she pursues her passion for elegant old houses, wishing she ‘could set about properly restoring the oil barons’ heritage’. And her thoughts during the final days before her husband’s retirement turn elegiac, realising that ‘this is the last time in my life that I will live within hearing of the call to prayer from a mosque (my favourite sound), the last time we will ever have a driver, the last time I can sit drinking tea in tiny, womb-like carpet shops in the Old City, the last time we’ll have a summer of blue skies every day’. Happily, Brigid Keenan’s passions for people, arts and crafts have continued well into official retirement.

Dr Jules Smith, 2015 

Brigid Keenan is best known for her best-selling book Diplomatic Baggage (2005), the frequently hilarious account of her gaffes and travails as a ‘trailing spouse’ following her husband in diplomatic postings around the world, continuing in its sequel Packing Up (2014). But her previous career as a successful fashion journalist, as well as the tourist opportunities afforded to her as a diplomat’s wife, have also enabled her to produce other types of books on various subjects. Her shrewd sympathetic observations make them both humane and culturally valuable. Last but not least, as a founding board member and participant in the Palestine Literature Festival from its inception in 2008, she has helped bring international authors and audiences together in events on the West Bank, under often difficult circumstances.

Keenan relished her jobs in fashion journalism during the 1960s, notably for The Sunday Times until 1973, developing influential contacts within the fashion world as well as her longstanding interests in design, fabrics and textiles. Her first book was on Vogue models, The Women We Wanted to Look Like (1977), while  Dior in Vogue (1981) also draws upon the magazine’s photographic archives, to tell the year-by-year story of the life and collections of the French couture designer Christian Dior, starting with ‘The New Look’ in 1947. Amongst Keenan’s descriptions of sumptuous clothes there are some characteristic personal asides, as when she recalls ‘a tussle’, aged 17, with her mother over the most fashionable length of a party dress: ‘I had been taken in a school party to the Dior show the previous winter, and considered myself a fashion expert’.

From cashmere to Kashmir, one might say, as Keenan’s next book was Travels in Kashmir (1989), subtitled ‘a popular history’ of its people, places, and crafts. In it, she refers to herself as ‘one of the last daughters of the British Raj’ (where her father was in the Army), and her Indian childhood as one she ‘longed to rediscover’. Not surprisingly, fabrics are prominent. She outlines the elaborate skills – and wretched living conditions - of the weavers who made Kashmiri shawls, highly prized in Paris and London from the early 19^th century onwards, which she calls ‘probably the most enduring “craze” there has ever been in the fickle world of fashion’. The book itself is a kind of interweaving: of memoirs, anecdotes, details of great houses, palaces and mosques, while its ‘Travellers’ Tales’ are of European pioneer naturalists and tourists. These included the indomitable Honoria Lawrence (a Victorian ‘trailing spouse’) and ‘adventuress’ Mrs Hervey, whose journals recorded her pausing at Anantnag, ‘only long enough to admire the “graceful trellis and lattice work” on the houses’.

Keenan also implies some identification with Isabel Burton, wife of the British Resident in Damascus during 1869-71, remarking that she too ‘fell in love’ with the city during her own residence there for six years from 1993.  Damascus: Hidden Treasures of the Old City (2000) is a large format and beautifully illustrated book (with photographs of private houses and palaces with exquisite decoration features, taken by her friend Tim Beddow). It combines a history of the ancient walled city, its ‘heart and soul’, with stories about its European visitors, amidst the traditional ways of life in its coffee houses, alleyways, bazaars and souks. ‘The Damascene house is always built around a courtyard’, she remarks, fountains ‘designed to cool and delight’ and ‘full of birdsong’. Of course, being written before the current Syrian conflict, this somewhat Arcadian account of what were formerly wealthy merchants’ houses is given extra poignancy, as are her pleas for sympathetic restoration of this magnificent architectural heritage.

Over the course of more than thirty years, her husband’s career took them to Brussels, Nepal, Gambia, the Caribbean, and central Asian republics, all of which provide a fund of anecdotes for Diplomatic Baggage and its recent sequel Packing Up. Highly entertaining (and there is a lot about entertaining) and amusingly indiscreet, both books follow a diary format in recording gaffes, menu disasters, translation errors and myriad difficulties with domestic staff. By her own account, she left the Paris salons to live in a Nepalese hut not much bigger than a chicken shed. While subsequent residences have been rather more grand, she experiences a familiar pattern of stresses – and attachments to people, remarking that ‘I spend the first six months and the last six months of every posting crying’. [The Independent, 13 November 2005]

Packing Up has more serious subjects. Alongside her husband’s final jobs for the European Commission in Kazkhstan and Azerbaijan, she has to deal with a diagnosis of breast cancer and undergo surgery. Other family events occur: her two daughters’ weddings and subsequent dashing to and from London to look after grand-children: ‘I feel like a maypole with my ribbons being tugged by my family in all different directions’. In addition, she relates her experiences during the Palestinian Festival of Literature (or ‘Palfest’), on the West Bank, which she helped set up from 2008 onwards. Authors who she persuaded to appear have included William Dalrymple, Esther Freud, Deborah Moggach, Michael Palin and Roddy Doyle, brought together with Palestinian authors such as Raja Shehadeh and hip-hop poet Suheir Hammad.

Back in Baku, despite some culinary surprises (‘pork with prunes came out more like pork in porridge’), she pursues her passion for elegant old houses, wishing she ‘could set about properly restoring the oil barons’ heritage’. And her thoughts during the final days before her husband’s retirement turn elegiac, realising that ‘this is the last time in my life that I will live within hearing of the call to prayer from a mosque (my favourite sound), the last time we will ever have a driver, the last time I can sit drinking tea in tiny, womb-like carpet shops in the Old City, the last time we’ll have a summer of blue skies every day’. Happily, Brigid Keenan’s passions for people, arts and crafts have continued well into official retirement.

Dr Jules Smith, 2015