One of the few advantages of having Annoying Son home over the Uni holidays is that he draws one’s attention to unusual things. Such as martial arts legend Bruce Lee playing table-tennis. One of Lee’s famed movie techniques was to deploy to devastating effect the nunchaku weapon, two sticks whirling on a […]
It turns out that there is a healthy market out there for me whispering into your ears. In that spirit, here is my podcast for the FCO describing how the Foreign Office operated in the years before World War One started. Many surprising facts in it about the tiny elite […]
Spotted on Twitter. This one takes all available prizes for getting almost everything possible wrong in a short space, while yet displaying a non-trivial knowledge of English. The better your knowledge of a language, the better your mistakes? Maybe one day we’ll get Incontinent Ballistic Missiles. The next step in […]
Non-diplomatic folk may not know the different levels of visit for national leaders. These include Private: the leader visits another country for a family holiday (and may or may not have an affable pre-arranged lunch or other meetings with that country’s leader while there). Then there is Official (or Working): a […]
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 […]
When I was over in Moscow in late 2011 as an official observer of the Duma elections, I made my doomed trip to Nizhny Novgorod by train. Part of the fun was waiting at the large railway station in Moscow, where we passed the time having a go with air-guns […]
This one is mainly for US readers as everyone else on Planet Earth has seen it already. Astonishing for the babbling Spanish commentary. Plus the goal is quite good.
This video resulted from a recent masterclass I gave in Public Speaking where Anna Baker was one of the participants. Not long into the class she said that she had been toiling for weeks on a major presentation to three hundred people that was looming in some ten days’ time. […]
But, as with so many other things, Obama always gives the vague impression that routine features of humdrum human existence are entirely alien to him. Marie Antoinette, informed that the peasantry could no longer afford bread, is alleged to have responded, “Let them eat cake.” There is no evidence these […]
