We have it on Jérémie Gallon’s authority that this book, when originally published in French, was described by Henry Kissinger himself as ‘the most thoughtful that has ever been written about me’. One can see why. This is, as its title suggests, an ‘intimate’ portrait: admiring, discreet and sometimes even a little sycophantic. It is not so much a biography as a collection of essays on aspects of Kissinger’s life. Some of them, like the chapters on his football mania, his girlfriends, his wife, his jokes and his Jewishness, are just extended gossip columns. Only two of them deal directly with his influence on American foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state. The rest are pen portraits of other statesmen, with observations about Kissinger’s dealings with them and his views about them. There are many valuable insights here, but they are scattered randomly about the text like flowers in a field. Still, they are well worth picking.

Since the foundation of the United States, the natural tendencies of its foreign policy have been domination of the Americas and isolation from the rest of the world. The size of the United States, its geographical remoteness from both Europe and Asia, its relative invulnerability to invasion and its self-sufficiency in food, fuel and raw materials made these rational principles throughout the 19th century. They became unrealistic when the country emerged as a global power at the beginning of the 20th century. Distance from other land masses does not confer much protection in the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles. And a country which is at once the world’s largest exporter of capital, its greatest supplier of services and its major technological hub cannot sensibly insulate itself from the rest of the world, as the United States tried to do between the wars and is attempting to do again, in an erratic sort of way, under its current president.

For most of the last century, the United States has pursued a foreign policy of aggressive interventionism in support of an essentially moral agenda: political and economic liberalism, democracy and human rights. It has not always been very good at this. Idealistic American presidents like Woodrow Wilson and F D