This afternoon I finished my first online course for the United Nations on the general theme of drafting talking-points and speechwriting. Running any course through successive webinars poses interesting new challenges. Above all, how to get the participants to do something useful between sessions and during the sessions. In this […]
After all the tomfoolery getting this iMac 5K Retina delivered, it did finally arrive. And what a device it is. Talk about minimalism. The computing power is built into the screen. Yet the screen at the edge is about the thickness of the pencil. You lift it from its box. You plug […]
+++ OMG! Stop the presses! +++ Michelle Obama did not wear a headscarf in Saudi Arabia! But wait? What does this mean? Some Saudis have Tweeted criticism, others praise. Elsewhere views similarly differ. Christine Odone in the Telegraph (paywalled these days): This gesture is being widely praised for sending a “bold […]
BBC integrity? How about this: my latest piece for DIPLOMAT on my encounters with the media down the ages: In Moscow in late 1993 I was in the Embassy watching the live BBC TV coverage of the attempted Red/Brown coup against President Yeltsin. We could hear sporadic gunfire. At the […]
Just look at this. A Guardian report about a large and rather over-excited football banner brought into a Belgian football stadium: The banner which said Red or Dead referred to the Standard colours and also showed a drawing of a masked man with a knife and the head of Anderlecht […]
I’ve been scrutinising public speaking disasters in preparing for a forthcoming online course that I am running for the UN on Drafting Talking-Points and Speechwriting. I found this handy list of horrors compiled a while back by Scott Berkun, with help from his readers. This one is good: Moscow, 1997. […]
Part of the problem we have with talking about anything is achieving an agreed sense of perspective on what we are talking about. Recall my piece about cycling and risk: It all boils down to our old friend ‘striking a balance’. As a society we have proclaimed that ‘using a handheld […]
Back in the mists of time I wrote this: In a city there’s a nice large green public park, where families and individuals stroll around happily. One day a group of leather-jacketed aggressive foul-mouthed types and some snarly dogs turn up and postion themselves prominently in one corner. This happens […]
That row in Poland about my speechwriting support for former foreign Minister Radek Sikorski rumbles on inconclusively. See eg here (where they impertinently add a year to my age) and here. Excellent that Hungarians are following this saga with keen interest. And Czech that! Here are some extended thoughts from me about […]
Veteran readers will recall my various pieces here about former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan turned voluble radical contrarian, Craig Murray. Read them all here. He is back in the news again, in what the Scots wittily term a braw stooshie (fine old ding-dong). His bid to run as a candidate for […]
