Left-Right: Speeches That Changed The World Introduction by Simon Sebag Montefiore Quercus, London. The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches Ed. Brian MacArthur. Partners In Power Nixon and Kissinger Robert Dallek HarperCollins

Oratory has since the beginning of civilised existence kept people in thrall. Shakespeare provided a clue to the riveting nature of speeches in his plays. You think here of Brutus and Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, of the many ways in which they played with words to convince the audience of the justness of the causes they held dear. But that was literature. In life lived from day to day, through the vagaries of politics, oratory has often been raised to the level of art. In Bangladesh's case, the speeches of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman were ammunition, over the years, in the defence of liberty. Gandhi was not a rousing speaker, but the calm religiosity he brought into his words drove the point home. And then there was Syed Badrudduja, whose command of Bengali, Urdu and English was demonstrated to huge effect in his speeches, particularly in pre-partition India.
Now comes this admirable tome of a work. In Speeches That Changed The World, it is a lost age, or many lost ages that once were steeped in idealism that come alive. You could argue with the editors, though, about the speeches they did not include in the anthology. Even so, there are all those specimens of the mind that recreate the past. History buffs will not quarrel with the inclusion of orations rendered by men of divinity. Read here Moses, coming forth with the Ten Commandments ('Thou shalt have no other gods before me') as also Jesus with his 'Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven'. Muhammad too makes a desirable entry ('Turn your face towards the Sacred Mosque'), followed by the Sermon to the birds by St. Francis of Assisi ('My little sisters, the birds, much bounden are ye unto God').
A particular characteristic of speeches, good speeches (for there have also been millions of tedious ones), is the inspirational. That is how John F. Kennedy, otherwise a not very dynamic figure on the broad canvas of history, galvanised Americans through his inaugural address in January 1961. 'Ask not what your country can do for you', he declaimed, 'but ask what you can do for your country.' It is a speech much quoted by JFK fans around the world and yet it somehow loses its brilliance once there is mention of Abraham Lincoln. The Civil War-era American president was clearly a natural when it came to oratory. The concluding words in his first inaugural address ('With malice toward none, with charity for all . . .') were a pointer to what was to be. And, true enough, it was with the Gettysburg address in November 1863 that Lincoln demonstrated the heights he could scale. 'Four score and seven years ago', he said with quiet insistence, 'our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.'
Great speeches come with a flavour of the literary; and Lincoln put literature in plenty into his speeches. Much a similar tenor was noted in Winston Churchill in his 13 May 1940 address in the House of Commons --- 'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.' Words flowed, like a stream, from the wartime British leader. In August of the same year, it was again an interplay of words that fired the patriotism of the nation when Churchill spoke of the sacrifices being made in the war against Nazism, 'Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.' Oratory takes the collective imagination to new heights, as Jawaharlal Nehru demonstrated through his 'tryst with destiny' speech in the opening moments of a free India in 1947 ('At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom'). Blood was being spilled in the aftermath of partition, but that reality did not deter India's first prime minister from lighting the path to hope for his people. Contrast these sentiments with those that Eamon de Valera voices in April 1966 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. His is an elegy, dedicated to the patriots he fought with once, all of whom were to perish in what for Ireland was an epic struggle for self-determination. In De Valera's words, 'they were all good men, fully alive to their responsibilities, and it was only the firmest conviction, the fullest faith and love of country that prompted their action.'
Speeches is fundamentally a journey through political experience straddling the globe. If there are the lofty perorations that find a place here, there are too the manifest lies that do not find an escape route. And thus, more than a year before he would get tangled in his venality, Richard Nixon tells Americans in April 1973 that 'there can be no whitewash at the White House.' It was, in truth, a contaminated world that Nixon created, and lived in. Morality did not matter to him, but it did for Vaclav Havel, who tells the people of Czechoslovakia in 1990, 'We live in a contaminated moral environment.' That takes you back to the moral superiority that General George S. Patton personified in his times. His speech, wherein he vows, 'I am personally going to shoot that paper-hanging sonofabitch Hitler', is one of the items in this anthology. The same holds true for Nelson Mandela, who defiantly tells the court trying him in apartheid-driven South Africa in 1964, 'I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.'
And so the caravan of history moves on. Along the way, Charles de Gaulle finds his own place in it. As France falls to Nazism, he takes flight to London, from where he sounds the clarion call that would rejuvenate his dispirited country: 'France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war!' Thoughts of war then give way to ruminations on peace, as in this placidity of a statement from Mother Teresa in 1979: 'Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the action that we do.'
It is a moving kaleidoscope of the ages you have here. For sometime, you go beyond the mediocre, to recall a world once epitomised by sublimity, larger-than-life individuals. Remember Oliver Cromwell? As he dismisses the Rump Parliament in 1653, he rails against the lawmakers: 'It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice. . .' His voice rises to a crescendo, as he sends the legislators packing, 'Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!'

. . . The power of the word

There is always something stirring about speeches, especially when they have the soul soar in every possible way. Think of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. It is a simple collection of words and yet it has resonated with generations across the world and time. 'Four score and seven years ago . . .' Who has not recalled these famous opening lines? There was, long before Lincoln, Demosthenes with his 'I have always made common cause with the people'. Demosthenes was an orator, in the way that Pericles was. Oliver Cromwell was slightly different, but when his indignation threw up in 1653 that famous reprimand to parliament, he went into the history books. The objects of his wrath all scampered off. Puritanism was finally in place.
You get a sense of history as it has generationally been shaped in this admirable collection of famous speeches. Those of you who have heard Martin Luther King Jr's earth-shaking 'I have a dream' address will not likely forget it. It is here, to take you back to an era when Barack Obama was far ahead into the future. The speech promised a rainbow, which was not what Robespierre had in mind when he perorated in 1792 thus: 'Louis must perish because our country must live.' In time, Robespierre too would perish in blood. And blood was what his rival Danton talked of: 'The people have nothing but blood.' In Spain, Francisco Franco caused much blood to flow, but that did not deter the indefatigable Dolores Ibarruri (La Pasionaria) from declaiming, in 1936, 'Fascism shall not pass . . .' In the end, Ibarruri and her friends were defeated, the poet Lorca was murdered, but their convictions have remained.
And conviction is what underscored John Kennedy's 1961 inaugural speech. 'The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,' said he, 'born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.' That was moving. Even more inspirational was Winston Churchill's 'blood, toil, tears and sweat' exhortation to his people. It would in time lead to defeat for the Nazis. Decades later, it would be Nelson Mandela's turn to arm his downtrodden people with his infectious confidence at his trial in 1964: 'It is an ideal which I hope to live for, and to see realized. But my lord, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.' Brave words from a brave soul. One other brave individual was the abolitionist Frederick Douglass who, in 1852, had this to say in his defiance of slavery in America, 'O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm and stern rebuke.'
Words, words, words. That is how Shakespeare's Polonius would put it. And words do leave nations transformed. In our times, V.I. Lenin and Vaclav Havel have made a difference. Even the not so cerebral Ronald Reagan has shaken up a sleeping world, or parts of it. With Gandhi, Disraeli, Jefferson and Gladstone, words simply went into a making of dreams.
Read on. And feel history swirling around you.

Men of arrogance, men of power . . .

Both men were obsessed with coming by power and using it to the full. Both were arrogant and looked down on the world around them in huge disdain. And both, in the end, were recipients of less than admiration in the world of geopolitics. That is the core message which springs from Robert Dallek's analysis of the Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in Partners in Power. If there are people who still think Nixon and Kissinger were meant for each other, in that political sense of the meaning, they must brace themselves for some very hard truths. One of those truths is the degree of dislike the 37th President of the United States had for his secretary of state-cum-national security advisor.
Begin with Kissinger. His has been a lifelong tale of looking for acceptance, in that schoolboyish sense of the term. As a refugee from Germany, having fled to the United States with his parents, Kissinger developed the usual syndrome of the dispossessed trying to overcome their past by aiming for the future. And he did well academically, eventually making his way to Harvard, as a student and then as a teacher. But that did not whet his appetite for power and influence. When the Kennedy administration came in, he went all the way to find a place in it. It was only people like McGeorge Bundy who blocked his path. They clearly felt Kissinger was an upstart who obviously meant to upstage others. President Kennedy was not impressed by him. In the next few years, though, a Republican presidential hopeful, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, was taken in by Kissinger. The Harvard academic would go on to be a senior advisor to Rockefeller, in the belief that the latter would someday make it to the White House.
One of the biggest ironies of modern American politics is the way Nixon and Kissinger found each other. In his years out of office, Nixon burnished his foreign policy credentials through travelling and writing for such prestigious journals as Foreign Affairs. For his part, Kissinger did almost likewise. More importantly, perhaps acknowledging the reality that Rockefeller's presidential ambitions now amounted to nothing, Kissinger made careful overtures to the Nixon camp which, for its part, had already begun to take interest in his analyses of foreign policy at a time when the Vietnam War threatened to tear American society apart. By 1968, as Nixon took his second shot at the White House and as opinion polls indicated a victory for him in November, Kissinger kept watch on the Paris peace negotiations between North Vietnam's Xuan Thuy and President Johnson's representative Averell Harriman. It was at this point that Nixon launched his 'peace with honour' campaign for Vietnam, prompting speculations that his staff went busily into the job of convincing an increasingly hapless President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam that he ought to keep any deal over the war at bay --- because a Nixon presidency would have better propositions on offer.
And that was the beginning. In the years after January 1969, when Nixon was sworn in as President, and until August 1974, when Watergate forced him to quit office, Henry Kissinger and the president enjoyed a partnership that was as bizarre as it was constructive. The bizarre was in the huge degree of distrust that underlined relations between the two. Kissinger's temperament, always massaged by Nixon, constantly undermined Secretary of State William Rogers. Through gradual steps, Kissinger arrogated to himself the rights and responsibilities relating to foreign policy that were properly Rogers'. He and Nixon took almost perverse pleasure in speaking of the State Department with contempt. The contempt would go so far as to keep Rogers out of the whole deal on the national security advisor's secret visit to Peking in July 1971. And yet the truth was that the president was not initially keen on sending Kissinger to meet China's leaders. Nixon was right in believing that Kissinger would in future take credit for initiating Washington's China policy. The president, obsessed with his place in history, wanted everyone --- and that included Kissinger --- to know and spread the word that the new turn in America's China policy was fundamentally his innovation.
Henry Kissinger was not averse to letting his aides know what he thought of Nixon behind his back. The president was a 'madman'. Equally maddeningly, Nixon thought Kissinger was an overgrown child in constant need of reassurance. Between them, though, they left a whole world changed, for better or worse. Their flaws were monumental. Both undermined governments they did not approve of, Chile's for instance. They looked away from Pakistan's atrocities on its Bengali population; and they dragged Cambodia into a conflict in their perverse belief that extending the war into its territory would halt supplies to the Vietcong.
In the end, both men saw their reputations take a nosedive. Nixon went through the humiliation of Watergate and became the first president in United States history to be forced to resign. Kissinger has been repeatedly excoriated by analysts for what they see his Machiavellian contributions to global affairs. Dallek makes a compelling case for himself in this pretty revealing work.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs and Star Books Review.