It is not often one hears from household names who are nudging three figures. Henry Kissinger, who will turn 99 this month, is older than any living world statesman. At the FTWeekend Festival in Washington last Saturday, the cold war grand strategist observed that we are “now living in a totally new era”. Given that his lifespan covers 40 per cent of the US republic’s, Kissinger has probably earned the right to make that call — wherever one stands on his controversial record.
Yet it was William Burns, 66, head of the CIA, who generated the news from the same festival. Burns said that Xi Jinping, China’s leader, was “unsettled by the reputational damage that can come to China with the brutishness of Russia’s aggression against Ukrainians”.
