On Saturday I head back to the USA for this year’s Professional Speechwriters Association conference in Washington DC next week. My task is to lead a session next Wednesday on the following tricky theme: Career: So you want to expand your rhetorical reach? What you must know to write speeches […]
Here is President Obama’s speech at the UN. Too long and in places even rambling, but it makes a broad cogent case for intelligent realism. On style, the speechwriters as ever strain for over-obvious rhetorical effect and drift into fatuous mixed metaphors. Look at these awful lines: Today, we see […]
UPDATE: More! * * * * * How to explain the fact that Hillary Clinton is still afloat politically? Or not in jail? This is a handy round-up (my emphasis added) of her accelerating woes over her private email server that she used for much of her work (most of […]
I reappear after weeks of running around the planet from one place to the next. We are putting together a bid for Media Skills training for senior international officials. An interesting issue in all media training is how best to understand/practise the many different sorts of interview that you can […]
While I am away, read this wonderful interview with Camille Paglia. She never fails to challenge = and dance gleefully on her crushed enemies. So many wonderful lines: My clashes with other feminists began immediately. For example, it was 1970 or 1971, there was a feminist conference at the Yale […]
I am briefly back from my travels around Europe including to the CTBTO in Vienna and then the UN System Staff College in Turin. Next stop? Back to Warsaw and the Polish Institute of Diplomacy. Anyway, in the past few weeks the students of UK Universities have been grappling with their […]
Here is my new piece at PunditWire about the tragic fate of UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband: One of the best quotes about politics and democracy is attributed to US Senator Russell B Long: Democracy is like a raft. It won’t sink, but your feet are always wet. Here […]
The UK general election takes place soon. In years gone by I used to follow every twist and turn of the elections process. Now? Not so much. Some sort of strange fragmentation is happening, so that our trusty mainly two-party system erodes into something that might well be more ‘democratic’ […]
It will be especially interesting watching how fans and opponents attempt to ‘frame’ the Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign, and indeed each other. My Indy piece a few weeks ago looked at the dynamics of framing in the UK election context: A classic framing ploy is the Dead Cat Denial. You […]
“She is going to own the wise, smart grandmother,” Walsh said. “Embracing the title grandmother – rather than running away – makes her real, makes her human, makes her a more fully rounded candidate.” (Note the shifty comparative.) It starts. The Feminist-Media Complex starts to bludgeon the world in general and […]
