At the end of every year, I attempt a first draft of history by listing what seem to me to be the five most significant events of the past twelve months. Some of my picks for 2013 also featured in 2012. I hope this is not because of intellectual laziness, but simply because the war in Syria, and the turmoil in Egypt remain defining events of our era. I probably should also once again include the tensions between China and Japan – but they are still simmering and have not yet boiled over. So I’ll give the Senkaku-Diaoyu islands a rest this year.

So let me start the list for 2013 with a genuinely new event that has global significance:

1) The Snowden revelations. Details revealed by Edward Snowden of spying by America’s National Security Agency – aided by Britain’s GCHQ – had a truly global impact. Mr Snowden initially surfaced in Hong Kong, just days before a US-China summit in which President Obama had planned to put President Xi Jinping on the back-foot, on the subject of cyber-snooping.