Mark Steyn never seems to lack material on which to base his beyond magnificent rants. Try this new one on the impact of Hurricane sandy and what it shows about modern America: A few weeks ago, I chanced to be in St. Pierre and Miquelon, a French colony of 6,000 people […]
A tongue in cheek (so to speak) Tweet by me this afternoon led to a micro Twitter spat on Gender and Sexuality. Cor! This is what started it: Charles Crawford@CharlesCrawford If it’s ok for women not to have men frisk them at airport security, why is it not ok for me […]
My latest piece for the Commentator looks at the way we have relied either on gold or politicians to give us Honest Money down the ages (almost invariably with disastrous results in the latter case), and wonders whether the time is coming to create a new form of money based instead […]
Off to Vienna for another Negotiation Skills masterclass for international officials involved in highly sensitive weapns inspections processes. Away all next week, so do not expect too much here. For something unusual to read in the meantime, look at this excellent piece by Mike D’Angelo about the famous jury drama movie 12 […]
Call me a killjoy, but I found the latest Batman film pretty hopeless. It was far too noisy, as if to cover up the clunky plot and vacuous philosophising. Is Bruce Wayne the secret identity of Batman? Is Batman the secret identity of Bruce Wayne? Do you need fear to […]
Part of the general problem we face these days is knowing what anything is. As we get better at looking at things on quite different scales, down to sub-atomic tininess, different patterns emerge. What looks like a solid, recognisable, definable thing turns out to be system of systems of systems. A lot […]
Here is a YouTube conversation between me and Jennifer Hardie (CEO of Pinnacle Dubai) in which I discuss in general terms the Negotiation Skills course I completed with Pinnacle last week. The general idea is that you should see this magnificent training for what it is (namely magnificent) and sign […]
Early tomorrow I head to Dubai, my first-ever visit there to give some workshops on Chairing, Negotiation and Cross-cultural Communication. Here’s a press release about it put out by the organisers, Pinnacle PR. If anyone out there wishes to get in touch with me while I am in Dubai next […]
Read this fascinating article about anti-semitism in Germany down the decades, and what factors have influenced it. A banquet of food for thought. But this point about the way Nazis were dealt with after WW2 by the Brits and Americans respectively caught my eye: If Germans could be influenced strongly […]
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 […]
