. . .

Back in S?o Paulo, the meeting at the university ranges far from the confines and dramatis personae of traditional diplomacy. Annie, a young woman with red and blue dreadlocked hair, tells Clinton about her dance and percussion classes and asks how to study in the US without paying college fees. A nervous young man confesses himself lost halfway through an abstruse question about tariff policy; Clinton, smiling and nodding in that vaguely automatic way of hers, bears with him all the same. Another female student asks for an autograph. When answering, Clinton sometimes opens her eyes wide as she emphasises a phrase; at other moments, seemingly at random, she pulls her hands apart as if demonstrating the size of a fish.

Then a law student called Marina asks about abortion – which is illegal in Brazil – and Clinton moves into treacherous terrain. She speaks of the Brazilian hospital she visited in the 1990s that treated not just expectant mothers but women suffering from the consequences of backstreet abortions. “Wealthy women have rights in every country,” she says. “And poor women don't.” Her strength of feeling can't be hidden as she denounces “the great toll that illegal abortions take and the denial of women being able to exercise such a fundamental personal right”.