George Walden

There’s an old Soviet joke about a Radio Moscow listener calling in with a question.

Do you sigh for a world without evil? A place where criminals are conscience-stricken and altruistic folk of all nations sit down together to make peace?

Here’s a nifty piece of timing: “The Age of Deception,” a memoir by Mohamed ElBaradei , has arrived in bookstores at the moment when its author is seeking to replace Egypt’s toppled president, Hosni Mubarak .

Everything about Otto von Bismarck was off the scale: his rages, his disloyalty, his mendacity, his gargantuan appetite and his colossal chamber pots. So, too, was the political genius of the greatest, if least lovable, statesman 19th-century Europe had to offer.

The onslaught would begin, American war planners assumed in the 1950s, with the detonation of nuclear bombs secreted by Russian operatives in Washington, New York and at ports and airfields.

Any notion that Lizzie Collingham’s “The Taste of War” might be a whimsical new take on World War II is dispelled in its first pages. A former research fellow at Jesus College , Cambridge, Collingham has produced a first-rate, substantial and enthralling addition to the literature.

Two steps forward, one back. That’s the pattern with modern China, and today looks like a “one back” moment.

It has taken a century, but Britain’s MI6 intelligence service is finally emerging, blinking, into the light of day.

When Julie Nixon Eisenhower met Chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1976, she wore a Mao badge -- and thought it fun. More recently, the Archbishop of Canterbury lamented the loss of a China that, under the chairman, had “guaranteed everyone’s welfare.”

Graham E. Fuller, a former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, has a book out called “A World Without Islam.” Great title. What can it mean?

When in Rome, do as the Romans, though not necessarily as Silvio Berlusconi does. When in China, remember the Communist Party.

In a Shanghai park the other day, I chatted with a venerable Chinese gentleman about his hometown’s past and present. The city, we agreed, is China’s barometer, and the shifts in its fortunes have been legendary.