Robert Cecil (British diplomat)

Robert Cecil (25 March 1913 – 28 February 1994) was a British diplomat and writer.

Robert Cecil was born in Southbourne, a suburb of Bournemouth, Hampshire (now in Dorset) in southern England on 25 March 1913.

He was educated at Wellington College and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA (Cantab) in 1935.

He married Kathleen Marindin in 1938, and they had one son and two daughters.

He was seconded to Major General Sir Stewart Menzies, the wartime head of MI6, for two years during the war.

During his career in the diplomatic service, from 1945 to 1967, Cecil served in the Foreign Office; as First Secretary in Washington, D.C.; as a Counsellor and Consul General in Europe, as Director-General of British Information Services, and latterly as Head of the Cultural Relations Department at the Foreign Office.

He had been made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in the 1959 Birthday Honours.

According to Cecil's obituary in The Independent, from childhood he had a close personal relationship with Donald Maclean, and the two both studied at Cambridge and worked together in the Foreign Office.

Maclean was a member of the Cambridge Five, who acted as spies for the Soviet Union.

There was some speculation that this relationship "cost [Cecil] the promotion to the highest echelons of the diplomatic service which his talents merited."

Cecil would later write a biography of Maclean.

Cecil went on to become a reader in Contemporary German History at the University of Reading from 1968 to 1978, and chairman of the Graduate School of Contemporary European Studies from 1976 to 1978, at the University of Reading.

From 1968 to 1994 he was chairman of the London-based Institute for Cultural Research (ICR), founded by the writer, thinker and teacher in the Sufi mystical tradition, Idries Shah (for whom Cecil wrote an obituary).

Cecil wrote three monographs for the institute, and also published several books, including The King's Son, co-compiled for Shah's publishing house, Octagon Press.

As well as his interest in Sufism, Cecil had a prior interest in the esoteric work of the Russian mystic, P. D. Ouspensky.

Ouspensky lectured in New York, and had been a student of George Gurdjieff whose school became known as the Fourth Way.

Robert Cecil died in the village of Hambledon, Hampshire on 28 February 1994.