More honest than most

It is a mark of the excellence of this memoir by the highest-ranking woman in American history, ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, that it could not have been written by a man. Imagine Douglas Hurd saying that the happiest years of his life were with a spouse who dumped him for a younger woman and that if he could have kept his wife he would have given up a public career. In his recent memoir, in fact, Mr Hurd skates past his divorce, while the serialisation of her book and recent interviews with Ms Albright have mentioned barely anything else. Or imagine a male foreign minister saying, after days and nights of negotiations with the Israelis and Palestinians, ‘I had eaten so much junk food in nine days I had trouble fitting into my clothes. Fortunately I had a loose- fitting jacket. A good dose of makeup helped cover the circles under my eyes.