AR: What do you think about your legacy — what would you like your legacy to be?

GW: I would like to see a harmonious Kissingerian balance of power, for peace — like in 1815 and 1878, not like 1914 — in which there is a commonality. Not an institutional commonality, but a political, cultural commonality between all the people living between Vancouver and Vladivostock, as belonging together. That is my earnest hope.

AR: And you personally; what would you like people to say about you and your life, and the way you've contributed to that dream?

GW: Look, I don't take myself as seriously as other people take me — I sometimes say to myself, "My God, it's like Groucho Marx — is it worth being in a club that has me as an honoured member?" But no, I'm not trying to be overly modest, but equally I'm not overbearing. My policy is as I say: I want to see the Jewish people and the state of Israel secure and remaining what it is; and I want to see an Ameurus in which the ideas that I cherish, which are the Graeco-Roman, Judeo-Christian values, are represented in that bloc of about a billion people with a sort of friendly relationship and hopefully a degree of human rights, attaining what people would agree is a good life.

DJ: You could be forgiven for having a love-hate relationship with the Germans.

GW: I've always had a great love for German language and literature. I am an only child and did a lot of reading, a lot of theatre, I read a lot of plays. Papa had a specialised library of plays, and so I read a lot of that. 

I loved German music, and loved looking at the greater Germany across the border from Austria, as one big democratic country. And this love has never been completely displaced, even in the worst moments, because equally I've seen a lot of examples in my personal relationships of people who have behaved well towards me, Germans who have helped me. So I was always trying, quite successfully I think, to separate Germany as an abstract notion from the specific hatred of Hitler, etc. 

Also, I believe that National Socialism and Hitler were eminently avoidable. It was made possible partly by the wrong attitude of the West towards him, and partly by the fact that if you study and take the last 18 months before he took power, under the microscope, you can see how much backstage intrigue there was, and how possible it might have been to prevent him. There was a moment when he was really on his way out, and then at that particular moment some miscalculating people, intriguers, said, "Now we've got him we can use him and then throw him away, we're so much smarter than he is." But he outsmarted them: this is the story of Hitler's Germany.

DJ: But what about Germany today, because you've published so many of the memoirs of great statesmen like Helmut Kohl?