Wendt approaches her subjects with sympathy, the better to draw them out. She has produced an absorbing series of portraits, ranging from the amusing to the profound. Paglia is ‘quite simply a storm … words spill out of [her] mouth like children on a waterslide’. Joschka Fischer, the mercurial German Greens politician, responds to Wendt’s question about his childhood with gusto: ‘This, exactly, was always a twilight zone for my generation in Germany. Good and bad was never defined – guess why, guess why … Thank you … This was a great question.’ Having known little about most of these people, I found this book an engaging and illuminating introduction to an eclectic and interesting batch of personalities.