In fact, we were hurrying along Fifth Avenue to get to Grand Central Station to catch a train out to Cold Spring where a friend and university contemporary, Adrian Ellis, has a house. I shall write more about Adrian and Cold Spring in my next post. By chance, Adrian had a most distinguished guest staying, former Cyprus Ambassador Nicos Agathocleous. Agathocleous is now retired but has enjoyed a most extraordinarily distinguished career, including long stints as Head of Mission to the European Union (whilst simultaneously serving as ambassador to the Benelux countries and Ireland) and permanent representative at the United Nations. He has a wealth of eye-witness accounts and we were soon swapping EU anecdotes (by coincidence, Cyprus has the presidency of the EU Council of Ministers in the second half of this year), but perhaps his most fascinating reminiscences were of his times as a young diplomat at the UN in the early 1960s, including the famous October 1962 clash between Adlai Stevenson and Valerian Zorin during the Cuban missile crisis (when Stevenson demanded ‘Don’t wait for the translation, answer yes or no!’ – It was surely that episode that Colin Powell had in mind when he produced photographic ‘proof’ of Iraq’s weapons of mass  destruction in the very same Security Council meeting room…) Nicos has no plans to write his memoirs. I tried to convince him otherwise. His reminiscences about Cyprus alone could fill a book!