A reader sent me this email message on New Year’s Eve: I just wanted to say how much I’ve enjoyed reading your sane and authoritative commentaries over the last year. "Spark of hope" indeed! More power to you! What a kind thought. Sane. Authoritative. Hopeful. Powerful. Yup – that’s this website! […]
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 […]
Not sure if I have linked here to my LSE book review about electronic voting, so here it is. Thus: The heart of the book is the authors’ emphasis on sensible risk analysis. Above all, they punch on the nose the odious “precautionary principle” – the superficially appealing but in fact […]
Here in powerful fluent form is Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, speaking today in Berlin about Europe and the Eurozone. If anyone can find a better peacetime speech by any Polish Foreign Minister or any Polish politician ever, let it be produced! Not that it is perfect. Too many rather […]
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 […]
Yesterday my Sunday was interrupted by a request from RT-TV (Russia’s answer to the BBC’s world broadcasts) to take part in a programme talking about the Eurozone in general and Italy in particular. As they asked nicely and as it was not too far to the BBC Oxford studio where the […]
Wearing my ADRg Ambassadors hat I was in London on Tuesday to give a workshop to a prominent law firm on The Psychology of Negotiation. The people who attended spend much of their time drafting the legal clauses needed to give effect to deals already done or in prospect. They nonetheless […]
Update carried also at the Commentator * * * * * Here is Ed Miliband’s Labour Conference speech today – in full. A bad idea to hand out to the print media the same version in micro-sentenced blank verse as used to help the delivery. It looks oddly like something from […]
My latest DIPLOMAT piece is up: The UK’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) has an imposing suite of UK-based and e-learning training courses for British diplomats. Some aim at improving skills (Diversity; One Team, Many Cultures; Communication and Assertiveness; Performance Management; First Aid); others look at thematic policy questions (Advanced […]
Is here. It looks at The Secret History of Democracy by Benjamin Isakhan and Stephen Stockwell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). And finds it more tendentious than enlightening. Basically, straining to demonstrate that the ‘Western narrative'( sic) of democracy is seriously incomplete, the editors define democracy in a dumbed-down prim post-modern way which […]
