Brown also has an eye for what is dull but important in East-West relations, such as the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe of the early 1970s. Having been the British delegate on Basket 111 (human rights), I can testify to the tedium of six months negotiating with the Russians in a spring-free Helsinki. But as Brown rightly insists, the Russians and Americans both misunderstood the conference's potential: the Russians by underestimating Europe's appetite for advances on human rights, the Americans by their distaste for multilateral negotiations and preference for superpower fixes. Russian dissidents understood all right, and to my surprise and pleasure the Helsinki Documents proved a major boost for the democratising process. In 1990, Margaret Thatcher, who had also been sniffy at the conference, gracefully admitted that she too had been mistaken.

So there are many good things in the book. The problem comes with the subtitle's claim to be "a definitive history". It can't be, if only because there is still a lot to come out, notably in China; also because Brown is a Russian and not a Chinese expert. His lack of feel shows in the bland and schematic coverage of events such as the Cultural Revolution, a catastrophe that in retrospect changed the world. The revulsion it inspired set China on the capitalist road and by exposing the country to military attack from Russia it drove the Chairman to reinsure with the US. Brown mentions the Sino-Soviet border skirmishes of 1969, but the reality was far graver. The Russians immediately sent tactical nuclear weapons to the Ussuri River and unofficially inquired whether the White House would give the green light to an attack on Chinese nuclear installations. Fearing escalation, on Kissinger's advice, Nixon said no. The fact that I happened to be working in Beijing at the time is not the only reason I believe that such momentous events deserve a mention.

He is also too indulgent towards Mao's loyal factotum Chou En-lai, blue-eyed boy of many a Western statesman (and of the opera Nixon in China), who had no hesitation in dispatching one of the main targets of the Cultural Revolution, the reformist Liu Shaoqi, to his death. "This one can be executed," said Liu's revolutionary comrade of 40 years. (Liu died by medical neglect two years later.)