Deep K. Datta-Ray is one of the very few researchers to have succeeded in spending a significant period of time embedded within India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). As he explains in the introduction to this extraordinary – if sometimes infuriating – book, achieving this rare feat took considerable persistence and high-level intervention. Only after convincing then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of the value of his project was Datta-Ray given clearance to carry out 14 months of interviews with elite Indian Foreign Service (IFS) Officers and their colleagues elsewhere in the bureaucracy.