When Goldschmidt visited the USA for the first (and last) time 13 years ago, he was quite unknown there, and arrived unheralded. He had recently celebrated his 80th birthday, but only with friends: in his native Germany he still counted for nothing, and in England, which had been his home since 1935, he was known to a few professional colleagues, admired and loved by a handful, and dismissed or ignored by the rest. As a ‘failure’ perhaps? Not even that.

Yet his bearing in those times might already have been taken for that of some illustrious figure constrained to travel incognito while in possession of secrets unknown to the world's governments or their corporate overlords; and that, indeed, was precisely what he was, and how in his last years the continent of Europe began to discover him – much to his amused and delighted astonishment.