A few weeks after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, Winston Churchill was a guest at the White House. President Franklin Roosevelt was so eager to tell him he had come up with a name for what would become a new world security organisation that, the story goes, he hurried into Churchill’s bedroom, to find the prime minister naked save for a bathrobe. What is striking about the origins of the “United Nations”, Roosevelt’s choice, is not this unorthodox manner of communication (a modern American president might have tweeted his idea) but that, in the midst of war, statesmen were already planning for the peace.