In previous series, I have relished his saucy little Alfa Romeo Spider, and – even more – his scruffy little blue speedboat. His runabout isn’t big and it isn’t smart, but it is very chic. It’s of a piece with Francesco’s easy familiarity with his waterworld. In the new series, we were taken to Francesco’s pretty litle island in the lagoon, replete with a retreat in hut form. Naturally, I warm to such a place, especially if it’s a base for travel.

That brings us to Francesco and the new heights of boatiness he has achieved. He’s off with a crew of stripey-jerseyed lovelies on a yachting cruise from Venice to Istanbul. The Black Swan, his schooner-home for the journey, is extraordinarily lovely. I don’t have many amenities in this corner of the Mediterranean, but satellite TV is one of them, and I’ll be glued to this show. 

The subtitle says it all: The rise of a President and the fracturing of America. Perlstein’s case is that in the 1960s two Americas emerged. Between the Lyndon B Johnson landslide of 1964 and the Nixon 1972 election lay the period when, says Perlstein, ”the battle lines that define our culture and politics were forged in blood and fire”.

The important messages from that period are not all that obvious. The 1960s were not a period when all society in the UK and US changed. Rather, one lot become viscerally liberal and another lot became viscerally reactionary. So what happened was not a revolution but a schism.

As has been remarked, Don Draper was bemused by his country’s love affair with John F Kennedy. The whole show is about Don’s “straight” view of the world as it brushed up against the emerging beat and hippie worlds. As the show proceeds to its next series, we may well see Mr Perlstein’s thesis borne-out.  

It is, by the way, a rather splendid book. It’s huge, racy. It’s rangy. It unfolds like a movie. I don’t know that one would want to read it from cover to cover. But as a bedside book, for dipping, it’s a treat.