KOFI ANNAN

This former UN Secretary General had an old fashioned class which is only found in Downton Abbey fiction nowadays.

His control of words and gestures was almost hieratic.  Nevertheless, his shaky and faulty grasp of the absolute magnitude of the tragedies in Rwanda or Bosnia remains an existential question mark.

Still he made the United Nations a partner which was no longer tolerated but indispensable. Principled without being preachery, distant without being aloof, he might have come over as belonging to another era, while, in fact, he was mostly above and beyond pedestrian categories.