I’m very sad to read of the death of Lord Weidenfeld.   He was one of my Trustees at the National Portrait Gallery – worldly, extremely well connected and shrewd.   He rang me up one day and asked me if I was free for lunch.   I wasn’t.   He said, ‘A pity, as I wanted you to meet Henry Kissinger’.   I used to enjoy the amazing dinners he held several times a week in his apartment on Chelsea Embankment which were the nearest thing I have experienced to eighteenth-century salons:  full of writers, thinkers, diplomats.   He founded the Club of Three to promote cultural relations between Britain, America and Germany.   Not to forget his role as a publisher.   I last saw him in November having lunch at the Carlyle.