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But Helen Fraser, the new- broom managing director and editorial uberfrau of Penguin General Books, thinks that it might put off some potential readers. “Hip teenagers and fans of commercial women’s fiction might not expect to find the Penguin logo on certain books,” said Fraser with diplomatic periphrasis. Fishy mousse things on individual spoons, crushed cranberry liquids, David Lodge, Jonathan Coe and Barbara Trapido.It was about halfway through that one became aware of a tiny row brewing between the venerable firm’s two most senior executives It’s about the Penguin logo. The fat little bird with the dangling flippers, the soup- and-fish frontage and the sideways gaze has been with the firm since Allen Lane invented the paperback 60-odd years ago. “So,” asked one brief, “the date of conception was August 8th?” “Yes,” says the baby’s father. “And what,” persists the attorney, “were you doing at that time?”

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Literary parties are a little thin on the ground in these autumnal, post- Booker times, but Penguin Books put on a very jolly thrash on Monday at a gallery in the depths of Pimlico.

Some of them are brilliantly self-cancelling one-liners (“Now doctor, isn’t it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn’t know about it until the next morning?”; “How far apart were the vehicles at the time of collision?”; and “You were there until the time you left, is that true?”) while others are surreal exchanges with witnesses. Whatever you make of the Louise Woodward judgment, you must have stopped to ponder the level of intelligence displayed by the Boston judicial system. It should come as no great surprise that the attorneys of New England are legendary in Stateside legal circles for their lack of common sense. You want proof? Into my hands has fallen a page from the Massachusetts Bar Association Lawyers’ Journal, that offers a dozen examples of no-brain questions asked in cross-examinations by attorneys.

For this reason perhaps Hurd is cautious: “Three steps forward and two steps back.” But even on that reckoning, Pax Americana is progress. For a while at least, realism and idealism are in reasonable harmony.. You may object to its economic and cultural sway, but in diplomatic terms the risk is not that the US may swallow up the world but that it may try to withdraw from it. Plainly the Western powers will be in Bosnia for a good while yet. Equally clearly, other conflicts could erupt, especially in the Middle East.

But after two hot World Wars and one 40-year Cold one, no global conflagration beckons. Far more likely, messy and sometimes barbarous civil wars will be the stuff of the future, calling for peacekeepers and humanitarian aid, but not the despatch of half-million man armies halfway round the world And the lone superpower is benign. Unanswered, however, is whether Britain will place outrage over Saudi Arabia’s human rights record above the preservation of multi-billion-pound arms contracts As the Americans say, don’t hold your breath. And, just yesterday, Mary Robinson.The real trick is to blend realism and idealism. Sometimes, as in the Gulf war, the task is easy: in opposing Saddam Hussein, their demands coincided perfectly. The same, in retrospect, was almost certainly true in Bosnia But hindsight is always 20/20.