JB: The Polish people, for example, in the early '80s played a key role, in a way that the Romanians didn't. 

DJ: Solidarity didn't have to happen, and might not have happened — it was a huge risk for the people involved — but it worked. 

JB: If you want to make a counter-factual point, the contrast between China in 1989 and the circumstances in Eastern Europe and Russia at that point is quite dramatic. That reminds us that how we understand China today is bound up with what we think of the Cold War. Now in a sense we have a very benign view of the end of the Cold War because our perspective is that of Western Europe. If your perspective on the Cold War was that of, say, South Korea or Taiwan, you might not have such a harmonious view of it. This is quite significant because in a way the question of when and whether the Cold War ends means very different things in different trajectories. 

If you lived in Angola, for example, the fighting between the MPLA government and Unita goes on into the early '90s. It has a different timetable, a very "hot" war incidentally, in some parts of the world — it was the same in El Salvador. So there are complexities, and one of the interesting things about history is the way in which you have to try and reconcile into an analysis, into a narrative, very disparate developments. The fact that individuals, groups, nations move on different timetables, that is a challenge. 

DJ: I want to come back to the beginning — the new government we now have and its immediate tasks ahead. Given your historical knowledge, do you give this government, this extraordinary "pantomime horse" as someone has already called it, a chance of survival? Will it make a serious difference or is it doomed from the beginning?

NS: I have to say, I do not expect too much from it. You can obviously take a disparate cabinet and drive it in a particular direction some of the way, but how far is at least questionable and it will take prodigious gifts of leadership. Margaret Thatcher took about two years to settle down, and she had a solid enough majority. If it is a fissiparous coalition, then I'm afraid it might be just a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and the lowest common denominator changes. I'm afraid I would expect an election in a very short time — in a year or so. Supposing they are confronted with a run on the pound and the IMF is called in, on which I agree with Niall Ferguson. We probably should now do the audit of the accounts to pin the blame very firmly to where it belongs.

JB: I am not necessarily disagreeing with Norman but this is not inherently a proof that the coalition government is a bad thing. All governments are coalitions — the Conservative Party, the Labour Party are coalitions, the Liberal Democrats more than most as a political party is a coalition. I'm not convinced that a coalition at the present moment is inherently less likely to succeed than a government which, after all, is supported only by a minority of the electorate.