Sherard Cowpercoles

In March 1987, as Professor Robert Service records in his new account of the end of the Cold War, Margaret Thatcher visited Moscow. She had been reluctant to do so, largely out of fear that such a visit would only make it easier for a credulous Reagan — as she saw him — to offer Gorbachev even more concessions. She had also been worried that it would produce nothing for British interests. Her hesitation to travel to Russia, let alone, as her advisers had urged, solicit an invitation, was perhaps surprising. She and Gorbachev had got on famously — shoes off, in front of a blazing fire — when she had entertained him, then only the Politburo member responsible for agriculture, at Chequers just before Christmas 1984.

I have met Dr Kissinger, properly, only three times. First, in Cairo, in 1980, when, as a junior diplomat escorting Edward Heath, I had to secure for an almost desperate former British prime minister a meeting with the former US secretary of state, also in town. Once with Kissinger, Heath promptly subsided into a deep slumber. I had the alarming experience of trying to keep the conversation going. The other occasions were more recent, but almost as scary. My hostess at the ‘secret’ (but much publicised) transatlantic talkfests which Kissinger (92 this year) still attends twice summoned me to sit beside the great man at dinner. On each occasion I felt like the luckless passenger in the Economist’s vintage television commercial.