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. There was no hope for my hair.’

Five hundred and sixty-two pages of such vulnerability — Ms Albright confides that ‘I had always needed someone to reaffirm my worth’ — would cloy. But most of this book, about a woman who was born in Prague in 1937 and ‘well into adulthood was never supposed to be what I became’, focuses on her ‘stealth career’. This career did not start, and then relatively humbly, until 1976, when she was 39 with three children and she was hired as the senior legislative assistant for Senator Edmund Muskie. In 1983 her husband left her for another woman. ‘I was forty-five years old, having spent more than half my life with [her husband] Joe. I had never lived by myself. I was an adult unmarried woman.’