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affection by the meetings I had with him in My Own World in 1964 and 1965.
    My first meeting with him was at the Savoy, with a group of Russians including Mr Tchaikovsky, whom I had met in the Common World in Moscow when he was editor of
Foreign Literature
magazine. Khrushchev looked cheerful, healthy, and relaxed, and he was only amused when two of his party disputed noisily. We talked together about the method of financing films in England and the bad influence of the distributors. I said that this was one difficulty the Russians did not suffer, but Khrushchev told me that films in Russia were often delayed for six months as a result of overspending and then waitingfor bureaucratic permission to increase the budget. He was very cordial and invited me to lunch the next day.
    On the next occasion (for of the lunch I remember nothing) I sat next to him at dinner and he spoke no word to me until near the end, when he remarked that I had left a lot of my chicken uneaten. ‘So much the better for the workers in the kitchen,’ I said. ‘Surely a Marxist believes in charity.’
    ‘Not in Vatican charity,’ he replied with a smile.
    Perhaps he had that exchange in mind when we found ourselves sitting together again at dinner. It was a Friday and he glanced at my plate. I was eating beef. He commented with a smile, ‘Meat on a Friday? I thought you were a Catholic.’
    At our last meeting he was personally dealing with visas for the Soviet Union. He noticed that my profession was listed as ‘writer’, and he expressed the hope that I would write about his country. I noticed how very clear and blue his eyes were, and when I rejoined my friends I told them, ‘When you see him close, he has a beautiful face, the face of a saint.’
    My view of him, I found, was not universally shared in Moscow. One day I was in a crowd outside theKremlin. A podium had been raised and they were waiting for the leaders to appear. From another podium a young man began to address the crowd. He made fun of Khrushchev and mimed some anecdote of an international gathering at which Khrushchev had pulled roubles from his pocket and scattered them to show their uselessness.
    It is a strange thing that sometimes that World of My Own seems to be influenced by the world we have in common. J.W. Dunne in his
Experiment with Time
might have argued that when I described Khrushchev as having the face of a saint (of a dead man) I had felt a presage of his dismissal, the news of which I learnt on the election-night broadcast of October 15, 1964, at the Savoy—where in the World of My Own we had dined together nine days before.
Omar Torrijos
    On a visit to Panama I was surprised that Omar Torrijos, who had become a great friend, was absent, for he had made an appointment with me. When at last he came he was much changed. I had brought my daughter to act as translator, but he had learnt to speak a little English. With us was a very dull English soldier, General Denniston. Others joinedus—a number of Americans, including a comic soldier in an untidy uniform who lent me a tattered volume of his published diary which I was not prepared to read. I was really there to warn Omar of an American plot. The Americans intended to foment disturbance with the idea of forcing him to leave Panama. Panama would then, like an island in the Caribbean, be used as a military base to blockade Central America. I couldn’t get Omar to understand the plot.
Sir Alec Douglas-Home
    In November 1965 I spent what I can only describe as an unenjoyable weekend with Sir Alec Douglas-Home, as he then was, at his house in Oxford. I resented his smoothness, his Foreign Office manner, even his silk pyjamas (although they were almost indistinguishable from my own) and his silk shirt, which was embroidered in pale blue ‘Marquess of Home’, an odd inaccuracy. I had received several messages from an Indian friend about radical riots in Allahabad which I showed him, and Sir Alex strongly advised me