Philip Bobbitt on Machiavelli, Obama and David Cameron

It may be pushing it to compare Philip Bobbitt with Indiana Jones, on the basis that a constitutional lawyer will never have the exotic and uncommercial appeal of an archaeologist adventurer, even if he does look remarkably similar. Then again, a profile of him in the New York Observer called him the James Bond of the Columbia Law School, which also suggests impossible glamour.

But you can see why his students and reviewers come over star-struck. He’s a courteous, urbane, well-connected (nephew of Lyndon B. Johnson) literary academic, adviser of presidents but way above the party fray, possibly the last Wasp standing in the academic elite, certainly the last cigar-smoker, a Big Name in western foreign policy circles by virtue of his last two books, The Shield of Achilles and Terror and Consent. He’s now 63. There was general fascination with his second marriage — at the Supreme Court, if you please — a couple of years ago to Maya, a Turkish law student, a formidable young polyglot who showjumps for Turkey and engages in deep sea diving. His books on US foreign policy are admired by Tony Blair and Rowan Williams. His latest, a rethink of Machiavelli, has a glowing blurb (‘extraordinary intellectual endeavour… may become a new standard interpretation’) from Henry Kissinger.

In fact he has a curiously old-fashioned charm — he’s the sort of man who will, quite disarmingly, ask you for your opinion about things and is tactile in a non-problematic sort of way. And apparently he can blow smoke rings.

We met in Albany, the Piccadilly roost where he has the nicest flat, with, unexpectedly, a little rocking horse in the hall. ‘We had a first birthday party yesterday,’ says the Prof of Pasha (a nice Ottoman touch), his first child. Then Pasha himself unexpectedly turns up, a sweet round-faced boy.