Talking it over

‘It is not easy to see how things could be worsened by a parley at the summit,’ said Winston Churchill in a speech on foreign policy in Edinburgh in February 1950, thus coining a phrase for meetings of international leaders that has stuck, and indeed spawned further ones, such as ‘summitry’ and ‘summiteer’. Churchill’s hope for a parley with Truman and Stalin failed in 1950, but his general concept is still with us.

Of course, as David Reynolds points out in this fine and thoughtful book, summitry had been around since Babylonian times, and on occasions, like Henry VIII’s parley with François I on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, it had many of the features of modern-day summits, but the author identifies two factors that make today’s summiteering so ubiquitous.

The first is air travel; since Neville Chamberlain took to the skies to meet Hitler in the three separate encounters in the autumn of 1938 now collectively known as ‘Munich’ the plane has been a key aspect of summitry.