It turns out that there is a healthy market out there for me whispering into your ears.

In that spirit, here is my podcast for the FCO describing how the Foreign Office operated in the years before World War One started. Many surprising facts in it about the tiny elite group of people running British foreign policy, how information was sent (or not) to and from posts, and how top diplomats simply had no sense of what a mechanised land war in Europe involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers would be like.

The overall result? Policy divorced from strategy.

Others in the series are here – they look at the outbreak of war from the vantage-points of our embassies in different European capitals.

An interesting and nicely executed way of bringing foreign policy issues to a wider audience.