At a Guardian event last June in which he debated with rivals for the secretary general job, he said her psychoanalytical insights were highly valuable.

The book, by his reckoning, was an attempt to fuse science, or at least psychoanalytical insight, with the study of contemporary history.

All these duets are exploratory, but they don’t read like examples of Graham’s psychoanalytical approach; they come across more like multifaceted sociological case studies.