The meeting of the twain

Seize the Hour is an admirable example of the storyteller’s power. From Homer to the great playwrights and novelists whose works we can hear or read repeatedly, the telling is all. Achilles pursues Hector around the walls of Troy; we know how it will finish, but like Homer’s audiences we want to hear it again. Anna Karenina throws herself under a train — for us it may be the fourth time. Ahab raises his lance to kill Moby Dick; it will end badly for the captain, but this is the third time we have taken Melville’s mighty story on holiday.

I’m sure Margaret MacMillan, Warden-elect of St Antony’s College, Oxford, won’t repine if I say she is neither Homer nor Melville, but she does what they do: she tells a good story. Although it is well-known to China and international relations specialists how the meeting between Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon came about in 1972 and what happened when they met, she pulls us along with her vigorous narrative and telling details.