We cherish the idea that we clever Westerners have something called ‘freedom of the press’. But what exactly does that expression mean? Does it mean that those who constitute the body of publishing folk who define themselves as ‘the press’ have special status and associated freedoms which may or may […]
One of the things I do on training courses aimed at telling people how to Write with Impact is to cite Shrek. Issues and Shrek are like onions. They have layers. No piece of writing can address all the layers of any problem. The trick is to show awareness of other layers but focus […]
To pass the time and take my mind off my bright blue foot, I have done a couple of quickies for the Telegraph Blog site where there has been a lot of energetic stuff about the EU Summit and all that. Thus yesterday: We awoke this morning to various commentators […]
Talking of speeches, the problem with being a speechwriter is simple. The better you are, the less anyone should know. Why? Because if you help write a speech for someone and it goes down well, that someone is likely to want to claim all the credit for the fine words […]
From today’s Sun on the poignant story of a very fat woman who was dumped by her fiance for an even fatter one – see the third para: Amanda Hart, 25, had a whirlwind romance with Matt Kemp, 27, when she met him online after struggling for years to find […]
Six days since I wrote anything here. The longest gap since the Crawfblog began back in early 2008? I have been running around, not least to Brussels where my training presentation on Political Reporting to startled European diplomats went down well. I banged on self-indulgently about my life and times writing […]
Famous Australian philosopher Tim Blair has coined a trenchant saying which is now known round the world as Blair’s Law. It illuminates a depressing but seemingly inexorable tendency: "… the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force" Almost anything said by the Western world’s […]
Here is a handy one-stop-shop for most of my articles for DIPLOMAT magazine. It includes a link to my latest piece on Diplomatic Drafting and Wikileaks: When I was Ambassador in Poland, the FCO published a fat volume of diplomatic despatches from the 1950s and 1960s, so I could see […]
In case readers here have missed it, my second Telegraph Blog contribution: Most people reading this website will have been brought up to believe that "liberal democracy" is a natural state of affairs. It trundles along in the background for the British public as for the Foreign Office, without needing […]
As readers here know, the Spiegel Online site is a fine way to find thoughtful pieces on the goings-on in Europe from a German perspective. Try these two for size. The first is an interview with Polish Central Bank Governor Marek Belka (who served for a while as a technocrat Prime Minister […]
