The idea of building a protective wall, however, is still the basis of our foreign-policy thinking as I’ve always known and seen it practised. Hawks and doves, isolationists and interventionists, neo this and neo that – whatever way you want to see it, whatever names you use – but what it all boils down to is that sometimes we pay and equip others to act on our behalf in an attempt to stem that flow – people who generally prove unreliable and prone to fragmentation and internecine conflict. People who are either irredeemably corrupt or who eventually come back and bite our ass, usually with the very means with which we enthusiastically supplied them. We naively persist too in the belief that superior technology allows us to bend the world to our will as we assume the role of Jupiter, hurl our lightning bolts down from the sky, whether it’s LBJ’s Rolling Thunder or George W. Bush’s Shock and Awe. At other times, despite proclaiming we’ve learned the lessons of Vietnam, we put our own feet on the ground, take the hits and then when the heat turns itself up, retire, pretending we’ve left something solid behind us when the reality is it’ll be toppled by the first strong wind that blows. And even though we now increasingly use drones and technology, our own ghost soldiers, to replace the human, not even 9/11 and our supposed global war on terror has changed the way we think about the world beyond our shores in any meaningful way. Sometimes I think I did pretty well spinning two books out of these meagre realities.

But such philosophical musings were far from my mind on that first day when fresh-faced, and yes, despite the heat, wearing the same jacket with its slightly frayed cuffs I had worn in college, I nervously climbed the stairs with their flaking paint on the walls and air of colonial decay, then was escorted into a large open room with perhaps twenty men and women working at desks and in one corner a stuttering teletype machine. I had been dispatched to take the desk and various duties of Nils Nordstrom who had been sent home suffering from an exotic strain of hepatitis and whose left-behind detritus I touched with an initial reluctance, in the mistaken belief that I might somehow contract whatever virus had laid him low. The head of the department was a tall, bald-headed austere man with rimless spectacles, wearing a stone-coloured safari suit, who, after ushering me into an office lined with filing cabinets and metal shelving but elegantly softened by white orchids and books, talked me through everything, pausing at intervals to inspect me by looking over the top of his reading glasses. He was called Nathaniel Greenberg, a Francophile who probably secretly lamented Dien Bien Phu had ever happened, and despite, as I later found out, coming from the Brick City of Newark, always conveyed the impression that his reed-like frame could be blown over by a strong breeze. On his desk was a copy of Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale – he’d obviously read up on my background – and, when he asked if I knew it, was clearly pleased that I did. I also learned later that it was his chosen means of evaluating any new recruit with responsibility for translation. And now I think that reading nineteenth-century French novels was what he mostly did during his working day.