His affectingly naive attitude to the past, however, is ridiculed by his fiancee and her patronising academic friend (Michael Sheen), a blood brother to the arrogant intellectual who lectures his date about Marshall McLuhan in the cinema queue in Annie Hall.
WHEN you have spent your long diplomatic career listening to lectures by arrogant Americans and Europeans about how others should run their countries and that the West is best, it must be tempting to try to get your own back.
When he told her that she was his first choice, Rose lectured Machot on his arrogant approach to getting married.
On Facebook, I'm lectured and attacked by arrogant people who claim they know a lot more than I do about polio.
With some exceptions, westerners in general were arrogant, blundering, ignorant and prone to giving lectures, they felt.
But Mr. Wang then stepped in with a withering lecture, delivered with operatic dudgeon, in which he called the journalist arrogant and prejudiced.
"I was arrogant enough to call the Castle and say that I was free to lecture or perform," he says, shaking his head, "and they let me do some work there.
Its leaders find it ludicrous that the United States, which they see as an arrogant new country already entering into a period of decline, should presume to lecture them about anything.
"Whenever I start feeling too arrogant about myself I always take a trip to America," he told students at his lecture at Yale on Thursday with his trademark dimpled smile.
But he developed a reputation as prickly and arrogant, irking Republican members of Congress and finance ministers from foreign lands by sometimes lecturing them.
It took Daschle's resignation to shake the president out of his arrogant attitude that his charmed circle doesn't have to abide by the lofty standards he lectured the rest of us about for two years.
