As Charles de Gaulle observed in his meditation on leadership, The Edge of the Sword (1932), the artist ‘does not renounce the use of his intelligence’ – which is, after all, the source of ‘lessons, methods, and knowledge’. Instead, the artist adds to these foundations ‘a certain instinctive faculty which we call inspiration’, which alone can provi

Any society, whatever its political system, is perpetually in transit between a past that forms its memory and a vision of the future that inspires its evolution. Along this route, leadership is indispensable: decisions must be made, trust earned, promises kept, a way forward proposed. Within human institutions – states, religions, armies, companie

Leadership is most essential during periods of transition, when values and institutions are losing their relevance, and the outlines of a worthy future are in controversy.

Meaningful political choices rarely involve a single variable; wise decisions require a composite of political, economic, geographical, technological and psychological insights, all informed by an instinct for history.

As a result of Austria’s defeat combined with Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine of national self-determination and democratic ideology, a plethora of states weak in structure and inadequate in resources now faced Germany in Eastern and Central Europe. Any future resurgence of German military capacity would have to be defeated by a French offensive into the

In the Prussian Upper House, to which he belonged ex officio as lord mayor of Cologne, he voted against the Enabling Act. He refused an invitation to welcome Hitler at Cologne airport during the election campaign. And in the week before the election he ordered the removal of Nazi flags from bridges and other public monuments. Adenauer was dismissed

‘Dominating oneself ought to become a sort of habit, a moral reflex acquired by a constant gymnastic of the will especially in the tiniest things: dress, conversation, the way one thinks.’[12]

‘Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions. These often settle themselves. It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.’[1]

Thucydides described Themistocles as being ‘at once the best judge in those sudden crises which admit of little or no deliberation, and the best prophet of the future, even to its most distant possibilities’.[16]