COUSINS AND STRANGERS: AMERICA, BRITAIN AND EUROPE IN A NEW CENTURY

Starred Review. On one of his excursions for the European Commission, as colleagues slumbered in a Beijing guesthouse, Patten realized he had been left alone with president Jiang Zemin and used the moment to discuss Shakespeare. Jiang, we are told, "nodded with interest" as he learned of the bard's sympathies for "political stability." Anecdotes like this, all of them well-delivered, give this book a delicacy which is absent from most political analyses. As a senior British Conservative and thelast governor of Hong Kong, Patten has a repertoire that shines with insider details. Readers feel the tension of being there as Kim Jong Il ("bouffant hairstyle...built-up Cuban heels; shiny gabardine boiler suits") suddenly appears "through a dooror from behind a wall hanging like a character in pantomime or a Feydeau farce"; and as a "fit-looking...sharp-witted, very cold-eyed" Vladimir Putin, tells lies for Yeltsin; or when John Bolton, "the Pavarotti of neconservatism," says-when urged towards a stick-and-carrot approach with Iran-"I don't do carrots." This book goes wide and deep on a range of political issues, often revisiting old debates with imaginative arguments and the kind of hard-won perspective which only a few political veterans attain. Patten wants a European China policy which is not based on "ill-judged commercial aspirations" and an American foreign policy written by people who have learned from Thucydides that you shouldn't bully much weaker foes. Well-informed and light on its feet, this is the most enjoyable, readable and engaging a political book in recent memory.