“Tarry not, I pray you, Madam,” Walter Raleigh is supposed to have cautioned Queen Elizabeth, “for the wings of time are tipped with the feathers of death.” As Harold Macmillan observed a few years ago: “Civil servants don’t write memos like that anymore.” Some have trouble just speaking the language. Nicholas Burns, the State Department...

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, for all his hauteur and condescending ways, had an absolute genius for driving people crazy, as if there were an Inspector Clouseau within him trying to get out. In 1993, he went to Sarajevo and told those who had lost their families and homes to stop their bellyaching. He “could name 10 places...