Henry Kissinger has not been in a formal American government office since 1977 and yet when anyone mentions a secretary of state an American diplomat Kissinger is even now at the age of 94 top of the list so there must be something distinctive about him. The key to to Kissinger's network was not how many shuttle diplomacy flights did he take I think John Kerry and Hillary Clinton thought that was the key. It wasn't the air miles that mattered it was the way in which he built relationships, Rana says.
Niall Ferguson is the preeminent historian of the ideas that define our time. He has challenged how we think about money, power, civilisation and empires. Now he wants to reimagine history itself. Networks, he explains, are the key to history. The greatest innovators have been ‘superhubs’ of connections. The most powerful states, empires and companies have been those with the most densely networked structures. And the most transformative ideas – from the printing presses that launched the Reformation to the Freemasonry that inspired the American Revolution – have gone viral precisely because of the networks within which they spread. Our host for this conversation is historian, author and broadcaster, Rana Mitter. The audio of this live Intelligence Squared event was recorded in London in 2017.
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