A radiant show with the last of the Edwardians; even the left-wing members of the

panel are visibly entranced. One sample: In the wake of President Nixon's trip to

Moscow, WFB asks his guest about his own abortive trip to Moscow in 1959, for a

meeting with Khrushchev that the latter called off because of the U-2 flight. HM: "Well,

I think that all our experts here very much overestimated Khrushchev's power. Because Stalin had been a ruthless dictator for twenty years, they assumed that his successor was a

successor to a dynasty as strong. But he wasn't for two reasons. First of all, he wasn't as

strong as Stalin--hadn't the extraordinary, almost maniac grip that that man had. And

secondly, the one thing Russia was never going to have again was the terror. If you're a

dictator and you won't have the terror, you are getting very near almost to a free system."

And on to civil disobedience among the trade unions, the Special Relationship, and what

had changed between 1942, when Churchill said that he had not become the King's First

Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire, and what Mr.

Macmillan calls "the India decision" in 1947.