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"I found this book absorbingly interesting. I read it not only with pleasure and profit but with a certain pride of the achievements of a friend and college-mate, who was the brightest among my contemporaries at Oxford more than half a century ago.

"The child is father of the man". Early in life, Mr. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike began to chafe at the stuffy aristocratic atmosphere of his surroundings. He also reacted against some aspects of life at Oxford, though he made his mark there in more field than one. "Oxford" said Mr. Bandaranaike, "was the dearer to me because she made me love my own country better."

H.S.S. Nissanka has shown how Mr. Bandaranaike's sweetsour experiences in England contributed to his philosophy of life which was reflected in his foreign policy. To dwell on his personality in the making of the foreign policy of Sri Lanka is not to indulge in the cult of personality.

After all, personality does count. Mr. Bandaranaike's personality counted as much in the evolution of Sri Lanka's foreign policy as Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's in India. Perhaps it counted even more.

In independent India, Mr. Nehru had a virgin field in foreign affairs; Mr. Bandaranaike took over a field, full of furrows, produced by his fervently pro-British and anti-communist predecessors. Moreover, as Nissanka has pointed out, he had to educate the public to take an interest in foreign affairs.

That was not the case in India. In India the educated section of the people, represented par excellence by the Indian National Congress, had always taken an interest in issues of foreign policy.

For instance, at the annual session of the Congress in 1897, (when Mr. Nehru, who was to be the principal architect of independent India's foreign policy, was only 8 years old) the President, Sir C. Sankaran Nair (who, incidentally, spent the last summer of his long life in 1933 in Kandy, studying Pali from a Buddhist monk in order to be able to read the Buddhist scriptures in the original) said thus: "Our true policy is a peaceful policy.

We have little if anything to expect from conquests. With such capacity for internal development as our country possesses, with such crying need to carry out the reform absolutely necessary for our well-being, we want a period of prolonged peace. We have no complaint against our neighbours, either on our north-west or our north-east frontier".

These are words which Mr. Nehru himself could have said. He, too, had nothing against his neighbours to the North-West or to the North-East - that is against Russia or China. Nor had Mr. bandaranaike anything against them.

On the contrary his predecessors had everything against them. In their eyes and especially in the eyes of Sir John Kotelawala, who once said that he was prepared to support even the devil in opposing communism, Russia and China formed the spearhead of an international conspiracy against freedom and democracy. In this respect, as in others, he was toeing the line of the Mother Country.

The Russian Bogey was one of the cardinal articles of Britain's foreign policy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and when the bogey put on the red cloak of communism, it looked all the more formidable. Mr. Churchill used to rant against "the foul buffoonery of communism", and Mr. Poincare against "that howling wilderness of communism, Russia".

Mr. Churchill moved away from this position after Stalin's death and recognised that "a new mood, if not a new spirit" had set in the Soviet Union. But under its first two Prime Ministers the Government of Sri Lanka still clung to its old colonial attitude.

It refused to establish diplomatic relations with any communist state. Even the much-vaunted, or in American eyes, the disreputable, rubber-rice deal between Sri Lanka and China was a reluctant offshoot of cir-cumstances, not the least of which was the USA's hamhanded interference.

Before independence and for a decade thereafter, Sri Lanka was like an elegant villa, the doors and windows of which were hermetically closed to foreign winds, except those blowing from the West and particularly from Great Britain.

To a large extent, that was the case with India, too, in the British days. The supreme service rendered by Mr. Bandaranaike was to throw the villa open to winds from every quarter and at the same time to strengthen its foundations, lest it should be shaken or blown away by the blasts of power politics.

How this miracle was accomplished - and it was nothing short of a miracle in that enchanted isle which used to rest so cosily in the lap of Great Britain - is the story of this book.

The nature of the policy of non-alignment, as practised by Mr. Bandaranaike, the influences, personal and impersonal, which went to the making of this policy, and its effect, political, economic and cultural, are all described in this book with an array of facts and figures, meticulously collected and immaculately presented.

This book describes how Mr. Bandaranaike effected a virtual transformation of Sri Lanka's relations with states far and near, old and new, and especially with the newly independent countries.

Even in its relations with its hoary neighbour India, there set in, in the time of Mr. Bandaranaike, a new glow, which was illumined by the personal friendship between, Mr. Bandaranaike and Mr. Nehru and has been continued by their illustrious successors, Mrs. Bandaranaike and Mrs. Indira Gandhi.

So serene and impartial was Mr. Bandaranaike's conception of non-alignment that in the United Nations, on one or two crucial occasions, Sri Lanka, as pointed out by Nissanka, did not hesitate to non-align herself even with India.

All this is described in a well documented chapter on "The voting behaviour of Sri Lanka in the UN". It show how in the brief span of four years the stature of Sri Lanka grew in the eyes of the world and how the world assembly recognized her position by electing her unanimously to the Security Council in 1959.

A few months ago a book called "India's Foreign Policy in the Nehru Years" was published in India. It was a compilation of articles edited by a distinguished writer and administrator, Mr. B. R. Nanda. What a dozen scholars and diplomats, including myself, had attempted to do for the Nehru years has been skilfully accomplished, singlehanded, by Nissanka for the Bandaranaike years.

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