Rummaging around on YouTube looking at some videos of Lionel Messi’s staggering football genius, I found this one: Never mind the superlative goal. Listen for the superlative simile, which is even better. Sharp! Mind you, there seems to be a bit of a theme here:
As Russians vote in elections likely to return Vladimir Putin to the Kremlin as President, check out some Russian elections videos (h/t RFE/RL). First, one in which Apple products are used to show how hot modern Russian girls just lluuuurrrrvvvv Mr Putin: Or there’s this one in which a young […]
Here is our old friend Robert Fisk showing what a great war reporter he is: I’ve been increasingly discomfited by all these reporters in their blue space-suits, standing among and interviewing the victims of war, who have no such protection. I know that insurers insist correspondents and crews wear this […]
Most readers of this website are interested in one way or another in ‘foreign affairs’. As I have described on different occasions here, the heart of international diplomacy is the state. That idea in its modern form emerged from the Peace of Westphalia. Here are some passages from my 2009 […]
A few years back I joined a seminar organised in the margins of a FCO Leadership Conference in London. The discussion focused on global trends. A striking observation was made: “in the past ten years or so we have seen one of the greatest changes in human history–a billion people […]
Sorry that there hasn’t been much blogging here recently. A sudden surge of work and a certain vivid domestic drama – about which I may write in due course (but don’t bank on it) – have been overwhelming me this week. Anyway, here I am marooned in Vienna Airport […]
Here is the later part of my Commentator piece this morning on Libya, featuring some thoughts on chess and politics – and why the usual clever moaners are wrong again: … slowly and surely and with a lot of pain the capacity of the Gaddafi loyalists to hold out was […]
Many of my loyal readers will not follow cricket. Nor do I, tuning into it fleetingly every few years when England manage to do something better than hopeless. But now, armed with Sky HD TV, a fiery England side and nothing else to do, I am enthralled by this England v […]
So much going on in the world. Most of it unambiguously bad. Tension in Kosovo. Tension in the Turkish army. Libya duly quagmired. Famine in Africa. Something or other going in and around North Korea. And so on. Yet bigger even than those problems, each of which is capable of […]
More mega-comment web-factories are appearing, before our very eyes. Here is Iain Dale’s new Dale & Co. site, a self-styled current affairs mega-blog. I of course immediately click on World Affairs, and what do I find? Not much, including this curious little piece by one James Chartlton (sic), a trainee […]
