It is always fascinating to read original official documents, in this case a selection of papers about the decision to release Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted for the Lockerbie bombing. So have a look here. Yet it all seems … incomplete. Where are the letters and emails from/to the […]
One of the UK’s top-rated blogs with the inevitably winning combination of a strong Northern Ireland focus plus Russia and eastern Europe is Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness. Have a look. The picture at the top of the front page is a masterpiece by Russian/Ukrainian artist Ilya Repin, The Volga […]
A youthful Crawf asks me what I make of the sending to Libya of the ‘Lockerbie bomber’. Very difficult to say, because it’s a fiendishly long and complicated story about which I know next to nothing on the inner detail. My only professional diplomatic encounter with Libya came on the […]
Guardian writer Jonathan Steele dies, and as such goes straight to Hell. He is greeted warmly by the Devil, who praises his life’s work and offers him a choice of bijou accommodation. Jonathan peers uneasily through three windows. In the first cell is Tito, screaming as he twists impaled on a […]
A lot of issues are a bit like living next to a mountain which is so lofty and all-dominating that you stop noticing the vast shadow it casts, fretting over which tree gives you shade instead. Take this erudite and trenchant essay (h/t Samizdata) about the deep problems of the […]
Most of the noise generated by Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s observations on a BBC Great Lives radio programme has been linked to his words on terrorism: Asked by presenter Matthew Parris whether there were any circumstances in which terrorism was justified, Mr Miliband said: ‘Yes, there are circumstances in which […]
One thing we Brits (sic) like to do (see this blog and many others) is to pore over the ethnic and other divisions in countries beyond our fog-bound shores and try to come up with ingenious outcomes for them. See eg Bosnia/Afghanistan/Kashmir/Cprus and so on and on. You name a conflict […]
Ha. Fooled you. You thought you were getting BBRU at Suz Blog hosted by LibDem tough blonde ‘cookie’ Susanne Lamido. But we swapped. So you have me instead. All the best BBRUs try witty themes, or at least cogent categories. This helps those who want to skip the political […]
If you are looking for a good example of why the Bosnia situation is so problematic, take national symbols. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is one of the two Entities formally established under the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995. The other is Republika Srpska. In principle any citizen of […]
The latest Britblog Roundup hosted by Liberal England is here. He helpfully re-explains the BBRU rules, ie that the suggested postings have to have a clear British origin. Easy! See this link to a piece about Atlas Shrugging in Kircaldy, the Scottish constituency represented by PM Gordon Brown: This is […]
