Kissinger

This is the programme of the week. In a superbly shot and edited feature-length documentary, the historian Niall Ferguson interviews Henry Kissinger and allows the diplomat known as "the private emissary for everything" to look back on his career with barely a hint of regret, far less repentance. "I certainly would go that same direction again," he says, "painful as some of the aspects of it were." He talks about the necessity to counter the threat from communism, the bombing of Cambodia ("It was the right decision that had to be taken"), the Nixon visit to China, the arms limitation agreement with the Russians, the impact of Watergate and the fall of South Vietnam. "I am unreconstructed in my conviction that Vietnam did not have to fall. We did that to ourselves." His description of liberating the concentration camp at Hannover-Ahlem at the end of the Second World War is deeply moving, and so — oddly enough — is his description of how Nixon asked him to pray in the Oval Office just before he resigned. The only time that he seems unsettled is when challenged over his support of the loathsome Pinochet regime in Chile. Like him or loathe him, it is a rare first-hand perspective on modern history.