"They are talking of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard as if they were Prussian Grenadiers," he remarked to Andrew Mango in 1991, not long before "the elite Republican Guard" (as it featured in the press at the time) broke and ran, along with the rest of the Iraqi army.

It was not that Kedourie's strictures derided the Islamic tradition, for which as a scholar he had considerable respect, but he was very clear that any such project as bringing democracy to the Arab Middle East was trying to make water run uphill. He was in many moods a man half amused and half outraged by -human illusions. Kedourie's respect for what human beings had created turned his conservative attitude to political structures into a scholarly discovery procedure: fully to understand why some set of institutions had come to prevail in a culture. It was also an antidote to the radical fantasy of treating human beings as raw materials for some improving project.

Being scholarly, however, did not make him into one of Robert Conquest's "scholarly idiots", who thought academic balance excluded outrage at enormity. In the hilarious and profound title essay of The Crossman Confessions and Other Essays, for example, Kedourie notes dryly that the Labour politician RHS Crossman "admired Attlee's decision to withdraw from India ‘despite the fact that it cost a million lives'".

Kedourie rightly thought that academics had no business telling statesmen what to do, which was one reason for his scathing judgement on Arnold Toynbee in the title essay of The Chatham House Version. But his scepticism about fashionable opinion, and realism about the inescapability and limits of power in politics are too little remembered. It is not merely that he understood as few others ever have a region that still baffles us, but also that the lucidity and economy of his style make him an enduring pleasure to read.