Alongside Hedley Bull, Martin Wight, Herbert Butterfield, and others, he was one of the founding members of the English school of international relations theory.
After a period of travel in central Europe in the late 1930s, he joined the British Diplomatic Service in 1937, taking the nickname Adam "after noticing that every head in the Foreign Office seemed to turn when someone asked for John".
[2] During the Second World War he acted as a liaison with the Free French in Cairo, played an unknown role in the Balkans, based in Bucharest, and was finally posted to Moscow, where he witnessed the victory celebrations of 1945, standing alongside the Soviet Politburo[3] and where he remained for the next four years.
A key figure in this organisation, he was first assistant to its Head, Ralph Murray, with the job of recruiting 'left-of-centre intellectuals' for the production of anti-communist 'grey' propaganda, and was later posted to Washington.
He returned to London in 1966 to spend two years as Assistant Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office before retiring early.