'President Mugabe said little during my courtesy visit with him in the presidential residence,' reports the former First Lady of the United States, '...and he periodically broke into giggles for no apparent reason. I left believing he was dangerously unstable and hoping he would relinquish power.' And before the manic cackling started? Had she arrived believing" that the crazed dictator's record of genocide made him merely a kind of Mandela with attitude? Hillary doesn't say; she just leaves the reader wondering what it was that Mugabe found so rib-ticklingly funny.

The self-importance of being earnest, I'll warrant. If you didn't laugh at Hillary's invincible rectitude, you'd have to cry. 'It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small,' she solemnly instructs