Throughout the half century of Asia's unprecedented rise, Dr Henry Kissinger has been a pivotal figure, orchestrating the United States' opening to China in the early 1970s and then going on to author tomes on Chinese strategy and world order. But at this transitional moment in Asia, his most relevant observations may be found in a more surprising place: a doctoral dissertation on 19th-century Europe that struggled to find a publisher when Dr Kissinger wrote it, years before his rise to prominence.

That book, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh And The Problems Of Peace, 1812-22, explored how two European statesmen - one British, the other Austrian - worked to bolster fraying relations among leading continental states at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.