Here for all Balkanphiliacs is an interview with me in the Belgrade publication Svedok. In the unlikely event you don’t speak Serbian and/or Google translator blows up under the pressure, here is the English text I sent them which as far as I can see has been reproduced in Serbian […]
Derek Tonkin makes plenty more smart points in emails to me which he is pleased to see made available to a wider audience (edited and reorganised slightly by me for this format). See especially his wise concluding sentence. Thus: Sanctions In 1999 the UK Government completed a general study of […]
Have you heard of anyone called Greg Pytel? The name rang no bell with me either until this morning, when this annoying peevish message arrived: Dear Mr Crawford, Over a year ago I wrote an article "Regulating financial risks" (it was also reprinted by a couple of financial websites like […]
You are probably wondering what is my finest piece of writing about diplomatic life. I ask myself that question. The answer is here. A description for DIPLOMAT magazine of the astonishing sub-culture of Diplomatic Barnacles, those primitive life-forms that cling tenaciously to the local Diplomatic Corps and can never be […]
Here is another DIPLOMAT piece, this time on ‘transitions’ from communism in Europe: Back in the mid-1980s I was the Foreign Office speechwriter working for Sir Geoffrey Howe. Exciting times. Mikhail Gorbachev was leading the Soviet Union in what looked like a strongly positive new direction. In Poland the Solidarity […]
Just when you think you’ve seen everything, the Human Mind comes up with something utterly new and outlandish. Such as this awesome site which grabs sentences found somewhere or other on Twitter and runs them together with other sentences to produce short poems in rhyming iambic pentameters: With algorithms subtle […]
I have linked here to many pieces first spotted for me by The Browser, a well designed site which does nothing but identify interesting bits of work and link to them. Like the simple and superb Arts & Letters Daily but in a posher outfit. Why, in its early halcyon days it […]
UPDATE George Monbiot has written to me to point out a mistake in the piece below: I note that in your blog post you say “This is not quite the same as listing his wealth – who knows how many ISAs and the rest he has tucked away, or the […]
Wikipedia helps us in working out how fast Lord Reith is rotating in his grave as the BBC sinks lower and lower: Rotational speed can measure, for example, how fast a motor is running. Rotational speed and angular speed are sometimes used as synonyms, but typically they are measured with […]
I have never in these pages given you an (almost) full account of the expulsion from Moscow of a number of British diplomats back in May 1996 for – the Russians said – spying. This was the first major spy row between Moscow and a ‘Western’ country following the end […]
