Brian Urquhart

I think you have to look at Dag Hammarskjöld as Secretary-General as someone who had dedicated himself to – for him – the most important cause in the world, which was the UN and peace in a divided east-west nuclear world. He didn’t really feel that there was too much time for much else except he thought that literature, all the arts, particularly music and painting, were an absolute key part of life and he was very active in all these areas.

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I think you have to remember that Hammarskjöld was operating in the Cold War. And during the Cold War, everyone – including one’s children if they were over five – had at the back of their minds a constant feeling that if you were in New York or Washington or Moscow, you might quite likely encounter a nuclear war, suddenly and quite unexpectedly. It was a very disagreeable background – I mean nuclear war, east-west, was perfectly possible.