eepening animosity between the world’s two largest economies. An impetuous and unpredictable leader of a nuclear-armed superpower. And a United States of America convulsed by racial turmoil and just weeks away from a historic presidential election. Headline news, not from 2020, but from 60 years ago.

In September 1960 a stellar cast of world statesmen – including Dwight David Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States; Nikita Khrushchev, the pugnacious leader of the Soviet Union; the prime ministers of the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia; and major players from across Africa and Asia, including Nehru, Sukarno, Kwame Nkrumah and Nasser – gathered in New York, for the opening of the UN General Assembly, at a critical moment in history.

Despite a brief thaw in the Cold War, which had seen Khrushchev meet with Eisenhower at Camp David in September 1959, hopes for a meaningful rapprochement had quickly soured. In the bitter aftermath of the U-2 incident, in which an American spy plane had been shot down over Russia on 1 May 1960, and its pilot Francis Gary Powers captured, Khrushchev lashed out at the perfidy of the US.