Margaret Thatcher was fearful of German unification because she believed that this would bring an immediate and formidable increase of economic strength to a Germany which was already the strongest economic partner in Europe.

A genuinely democratic Iraq might well act as a fresh spur.

Silence is regarded as a sort of sin now, and it has to be filled with a lot of gossip and soundbites.

History provides no precise guidelines.

But Germany will always suffer, I fear, from the intensely dramatic character of the crimes of the Third Reich.

Margaret Thatcher, growing up in a bombed and battered Britain, derived a distrust which has grown with the years not just of Germany but of all continental Europe.

Diplomacy is unfashionable in the world of knee-jerk reaction and the dogmatic sound bite on television.