Sometimes small incidents are the most revealing. Last year in Strasbourg I was covering a joint press conference held by the European Commission President, Romano Prodi, and the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, who was paying a visit to the European Parliament.
Any journalist or politician will tell you that mobile phones are a blight on such events: their insidious ringing can destroy concentration and ruin "soundbites" or television footage. As the Secretary-General was answering a question in his usual soft-spoken but unhesitating manner, a photographer's phone went off.
Slaves to media coverage, most politicians would plough ahead and hope for the best. Not Kofi Annan: he stopped talking and looked with deceptive meekness at the offender, who instantly quenched the raucous device. All over the room, people quietly switched off their mobiles and the press conference continued.
It was a telling display of the man's quiet dignity and authority. Without a word, this son of an African chief had restored the solemnity of an occasion where the top civil servants of Europe and the United Nations were giving their views on current issues.
He would not be in his present job if he were not possessed of exceptional qualities. Today, he will almost certainly be approved by acclamation in the General Assembly for a further five-year term as Secretary-General, having been nominated - also by acclamation - last Wednesday by all members of the Security Council, including Ireland.
It is a considerable achievement to win such widespread support from such a disparate and often fractious body as the United Nations. But it was also a major feat in the first place for Annan to work his way up from a relatively junior position in the UN bureaucracy to take the top job in 1997. The seventh Secretary-General, he is the first to be elected from the ranks of the UN staff.
He is a man who moves easily between worlds: whether the continent of his birth or his country of residence, the United States. He was born in Kumasi, Ghana, on April 8th, 1938. His undergraduate studies in economics began at home but were completed in the US, at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota.
He attended the prestigious Institut Universitaire des Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva before taking a Master of Science degree in management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
His knowledge of management technique has stood him in good stead and contributed to his cordial relationship with the Americans, in particular, who rate these skills highly.
He joined the United Nations "system" as an administrative and budget officer with the World Health Organisation in Geneva in 1962. He served in a variety of international posts before coming to UN headquarters to take charge of personnel matters in 1987.
His first great challenge and the "big break" that opened the door to further high advancement was a special assignment to negotiate the release of over 900 UN staff and Western hostages in Iraq in 1990, following the Iraqi takeover of Kuwait. "He succeeded brilliantly," an old UN hand recalls.
After a stint in charge of budgets, Annan became No 2 and later No 1 in charge of peacekeeping operations. The 1990s were not a happy time for the organisation, with massacres under the noses of UN troops in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica and in Rwanda.
The blame for these disasters was distributed too widely for Annan's progress to be halted and he won some credit when, after becoming Secretary-General on January 1st, 1997, he published what were seen as frank and honest reports on both situations.
With the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 there was a temporary wave of euphoria in international relations and an idealistic but naive expectation in some circles that the UN would take the helm and gently but firmly steer the world into more placid waters. Sadly, this has not proved to be the case, and there have been many rocky moments since.
Yet Annan has won praise for his calm and unruffled style of leadership. His critics say he is too close to the Americans and the British, whereas others argue that he has played a crucial role in keeping the US on board at a time when there are strong anti-UN and even isolationist currents in American politics.
His re-election should help to make him more independent of the big powers which wield such disproportionate influence in the UN, especially on the Security Council. This week he had a resounding success with the special session of the General Assembly on HIV/ AIDS which contributed more than any other recent event to the advancement of Annan's declared objective of "bringing the United Nations closer to the people".