“Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you, or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country?” The words have a familiar ring, but they don’t seem quite right. When the young president John F Kennedy refined the phrase to impose more directly on the American people’s sense of duty in his inaugural address of 1961, few would have realised that he was adapting the words of the Lebanese poet and essayist Kahlil Gibran.

Those were the days when American leaders could happily make reference to the great thinkers of middle eastern culture. (Kennedy’s brother Bobby preferred to quote from his “favourite” writer, Aeschylus, pulling his centre of intellectual inspiration a few miles west. I’m not sure which seems more distant in time: the golden age of Pericles, or a time when US political rhetoric did not resemble a script from Sesame Street.)