The All Souls historian Rohan Butler concluded the first volume of his biography of the French statesman Choiseul with this sentence on page 1,078: “The diplomatic and political career of the Duke of Choiseul had begun.”

Alas, Butler died before he was able to continue the story. We must hope that the same fate does not befall Niall Ferguson, the author of this huge biography of a great international public servant and scholar. Weighing in at close to 1,000 pages, it ends at the moment in 1968 when Henry Kissinger gets his first big job in a Washington administration, as national security adviser to President Richard Nixon. The runway to take-off stretches a very long way.

This is not to contest Kissinger’s importance and notoriety in 20th-century history. Now 92, he is one of the giants of America’s years of global pre-eminence. No wonder he appeared 15 times on the cover of Time magazine during his period as national security adviser and then secretary of state. Moreover, he continued to attract celebrity attention for decades after leaving office in 1977. This is partly because of his record in government, which made him the dark darling of conspiracy theorists; the next volume of this biography will presumably cover some of these controversies. Kissinger has also been kept in the spotlight by his regular and authoritative interventions in public debate, which continue to this day.