The private encounters described in this new book stretched from 1967 to the present and were the products of friendship, research, happenstance, curiosity or calculated risk. From Gerald Ford to Robert Mugabe, they’re taken as found: an ascendant Soviet leader, abandoning his tour group for more interesting company, a charismatic Jamaican socialist whose policies split his island into warring halves, an African president-for-life who believed that all power is based in violence, another next door with his own distinctive system of things, a first lady of Fascism, the most right-wing judge on the U.S. Supreme Court, a Somali general in an anarchic world of his own making, an Ulster firebrand tamed by time and fatal prognosis, Afghan jihadists funded by an America whose culture they hate, Iranian revolutionaries and various other stand-outs in this panorama of personalities.

The point of view is as judgmental as a tape recorder. If there’s an attitude it’s open-minded, sceptical and a shade cynical, proceeding from a working assumption that much of what we’ve read or been taught is at least partly false, often entirely false.