A few years after the end of her premiership Margaret Thatcher came to spend two hours with us, and we are still looking for the full tape! But here’s a fascinating fragment of that conversation from 1992 as she reminisces about her first meeting with Gorbachev when he dropped in for a real conversation (with no preparatory notes and only his translator) at 10 Downing Street.

To our interview collection of occupants of the office (Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, George Schultz, Madeline Albright) we must add Warren Christopher. He  filled that most important cabinet position during all of the first term of Bill Clinton. Here in 2001 he reminisces about such problems as Bosnia, Haiti, NAFTA and Yeltsin on his good and bad (drunken) days.

The question has often been asked. Here, former CIA Director William Colby addresses one  famous instance: the case of KGB defector Yuri Nosenko. Curiously, one important CIA personage, James Jesus Angleton, ended by madly accusing Colby himself of being a double agent of the KGB!

In 2000 we were joined by Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita’s son. He had by then become a professor at Brown University and had just  published a definitive volume on his father’s personal history and political career, his role in the Cold War and his ultimate fall from power. We were joined in discussion with this fascinating guest by John Bushnell, professor of Russian history at Northwestern University.

Despite his trial in Jerusalem and his subsequent execution, Eichmann, who was in charge of the Holocaust of European Jewry, remains an enigmatic figure. Was he merely a bureaucrat “following orders” or was he an enthusiastic mass-murderer? One of the best book-length studies of Eichmann was by Neal Bascom. Here he is in a full discussion from 2009.