Part of the charm of writing blog-pieces for national newspapers and being active on Twitter is that you attract all sorts of views. What if many of them are deliberately trollishly offensive? In principle there is nothing to be done about this if you believe in free media. Yet it […]
My latest piece at Telegraph Blogs on the MH17 disaster and who knows what has picked up a lot of attention, including in Australia: The cause of the attack on the plane will have been known immediately to the Russian side. Missiles capable of hitting aircraft at that altitude cannot […]
Long time no blog. Too much work that (unlike writing here) pays something, including mulling over my first book on the general theme of diplomatic speechwriting. Then there’s been the World Cup. I currently am busy preparing for several masterclasses in Poland later this month, on Diplomatic Drafting and (now) […]
One of the features of my former site was the revolving set of comments from happy or disgruntled readers and others. That has gone (“no clutter!”). But some of them were wonderful in unexpected ways, and most of the ones that were less than wonderful were at least noteworthy. So, […]
I am whirring away on my Speechwriting book. It takes me back to this effort that I prepared back in 1986 for the then Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe. The opulent surroundings and fine nourishment of the annual Lord mayor’s Diplomatic Banquet were not an obvious choice for a speech on […]
Attentive readers will recall that I have been having an e-discussion with Frances Coppola about the morality of the Ayn Rand novels and their wider significance today. The second episode published over at the Commentator in January is here. The third episode is here. It features the train-crash from Atlas […]
Rummaging around in my website I found this magnificent Islamist forgery that has been doing the global rounds for many years: a letter supposedly from Prime Minister John Major to FCO Minister of State Douglas Hogg urging him to be horrid to the Bosnian Muslims (aka Bosniacs). Here it is: […]
The bombastic smirking of Russia’s Victory Day parades is on a quite new scale this year. And why not? How often these days does a country get to boast to itself that it has grabbed part of some other country’s territory and seemingly got away with it? How did we […]
Things have slackened off again here, what with one thing and another. But here is the hefty piece I wrote about Ukraine last week for the Daily Telegraph. To be precise, I did not write it. I dictated it into my iPad from my hotel room in Gjakova (also known […]
Here’s the next part of my e-discussion with Frances Coppola on Atlas Shrugged and what it all means: CC In Atlas Shrugged Dagny’s shooting of Rusty is, I agree, given a curious and opaque justification: “…a man who wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousness”. It seems to […]
