He had a "totally English" surname and had died overseas in the 1960s while his father was on a foreign posting with the Royal Marines.
Soon, however, he was with the CIA in IT security, a job that a couple of years later led to a foreign posting under the cloak of a diplomatic assignment.
It reads like the dream of a repressed and awkward man who might be a young soldier on a foreign posting, or Sayyid Qutb in Greeley, Colorado, or Mohamed Atta in Harburg, Germany.
And if you work for a state-owned firm, you cannot refuse to go, he adds.Young Chinese white-collar workers may enjoy the adventure of a foreign posting.
To give a flavour of the relationship, one broadcaster still well-known today had to be brought home from a foreign posting in the 1980s after BBC management became alarmed that his relationship with MI6 was becoming too overt.
He argues that the professional diplomat, like the sensitive writer, has to be able to mix with both elites and masses; be firmly rooted in his own culture while open to the experience of others; have inner resources to fall back upon in coping with the isolation of a foreign posting (what Auden called "this nightmare of public solitude").
So, halfway through my Ph.D., I decided to take the bull by the horns and secure a foreign posting.
Then I ended up working in financial journalism in London, thinking that a foreign posting was a great escape from the bland industrial parks, highways and strip malls of California.
By 1823 Maxwell was in command of organising operations against smugglers, and later in the year he was given a foreign posting in command of off South America.
Then we could have had a foreign posting or invented a career that would have made it possible for him to be away,""Downton Abbey" creator Julian Fellowes explained to the Telegraph.
