Bashar al Assad gives interviews in a library in a guest house in the grounds of the presidential palace in the west of Damascus. The palace looks down on the city from a crag; the guest house is a discreet half-mile or so from the main building, just off the spine of the hill, at the end of its own long, straight drive. Gardeners keep the lawns and trees neat. But outcrops of rock and scrub hint at what this once was—a windy, wintery Syrian hilltop on a high mountain plateau, coveted over the centuries by defenders or invaders of Damascus. Perhaps because I have been across the front line to the suburbs held by armed rebels, no more than five miles or so from the palace, I have a sense of the war pressing in, and the weight of history of this ancient country. The palace is a workplace; the Assads live elsewhere. The marble guest house is built in the style of a small hotel; the library leads off a central majlis, or sitting area, with perhaps 30 armchairs. The fountains at the corners of the majlis were dry when I visited on February 8. It felt as if the place had been opened up for our benefit.

In the library the section containing books in English has a copy of the autobiography of King Juan Carlos of Spain, inscribed affectionately by the author. Next to it, unsigned, are Known and Unknown, Donald Rumsfeld's memoir of his time at the Pentagon, and Piers Morgan's The Insider: the Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade.

I wondered idly as I waited for the president to arrive about the conclusions he might have drawn from the books, if he had read them; about the preoccupations and strange intersections of the lives of royalty, politicians and celebrities in the West. The powerful classes in Europe and the United States live, at least partly, in public. But what goes on when the president, his siblings and his cousins talk business, which these days means the conduct of the war, is a family matter.

President Assad disappears from Syrian television for weeks on end. His wife, Asma, who grew up in a Syrian family in London, is rarely seen on the news, though she has a presence on Instagram.

When the president's aides told me he had arrived, I was taken across a polished floor from the library to a sitting room, more intimate than the majlis but still large. I was expecting the president to exhibit some sign of strain. But he had not noticeably changed since the last interview I had done with him, in 2010, five months or so before Mohamed Bouazizi, a vegetable seller in Tunisia, immolated himself outside the governor's office in his dusty home town, setting off the chain of events that is still shaking the Middle East.