We were talking about China when Mathew Burrows began to tell me about his mother. She had broken her pelvis at Christmas, and he was looking after her, working for the Stimson Center from home; everyone there, he said, had been very kind. I was caring for a parent of my own, and for a time the rivalry between the world’s two great powers waited while we talked about looking after the people who once looked after us. She was mending well, and he was grateful to be with her.

He owed her a great deal, he told me, above all his love of learning. When he was a child, he asked a librarian for another book on the French Revolution, and the librarian was surprised enough to mention it to his mother. I liked that word, “another.” Even then he suspected that one account could never be the whole story. His mother encouraged him to read about history, about other countries and the lives people led in them, and he spoke of that encouragement the way others speak of an inheritance.