Sir Arthur C Clarke has died. I grew up on his short stories. One sticks in my memory nearly 50 years later. It shows how slow computers were in those days: a job which took four days could now be done by the chip in a singing birthday card almost […]
When I set up this site I naively thought that some people with an interest in international affairs would stumble over it and that a few of them might like to submit fair-minded comments, so a bit of grown-up dialogue on different policy issues might take place for general edification. One […]
More human tragedy in the USA for the Presidential candidates to consider.
I first mentioned it here. And now it’s back. The best, and more importantly only, way to stop burning off carbon to power the planet is to find something else which works. More technology. Preferably quickly.
The misfortunes of Paul Gascoigne are ever on my mind, as each day I have occasion to see in my WC the framed photograph signed by him which we were given as a wedding present back in 1990 at the height of Gazzamania. The message was the work of a […]
I had the great pleasure of meeting Bill Buckley back in July 2005, a day after the terrorist bombings in London. He personified the existential far opposite of that nihilistic violence. A calm, positive, witty, astute, sophisticated and reasonable man who lived for and through ideas. Above all specific and profound ideas […]
Back in the summer of 2002 I made a significant but little-known impact on the Foreign Office’s posting policy. I think. Mulling over the tragedy of my career I asked my PA to crunch the numbers for me. She took the top forty names in the FCO, added up all […]
A neat way to stump your friends is to ask them how many matches (no replays – penalties decide a drawn game) it takes to have a simple knock-out football competition between four teams with one side winning. "Er," they say, "surely three: two semi-finals get two teams into the […]
The blog of Foreign Secretary David Miliband on the FCO website is an interesting attempt to make Ministers and the foreign policy process more accessible to the public. The tricky thing with such initiatives aimed at reflecting what busy senior people think is that busy people are busy. So keeping a blog […]
