Once upon a time supporting human rights included defending free speech, even if it was speech one did not much like or welcome. This also included presenting moderation and self-restraint as ends in themselves. Promoting the profound and difficult idea that rational, reasonable, constructive, positive ends would not be achieved by irrational, unreasonable, destructive, negative means. […]
How to assess the life and works of Fidel Castro? CNN has the line. Castro was a not too bad fellow who did good things for ‘social reform’ in Cuba and who was praised in some circles for standing up to the United States. Oh, and he was criticized for […]
The fine diplomatic art of briefing journalists badly. Or "How to be Clever – but not Wise".
This BBC website story burbles on about a car that runs on compressed air. But it doesn’t. It runs on the power used to compress the air. So to say that the car produces ‘zero emissions’ is silly. The emissions are just produced by a power station of some sort up […]
Civil servants of all shapes and sizes have their various dealings with the public. But rarely in this country are formal bureaucratic proceedings available to a wider public to observe. Thanks to the miracle of YouTube we can at least watch some of the remarkable exchanges between an avowedly conservative […]
The greatest theme of our times? Big v Small. For most of the past hundred years or so Bigness was the thing. Technology was clunky and expensive, so it made market and operational sense to pool resources to buy it and manage it. Bigness made the notion of mass-scale ‘planning’ on both sides […]
The Guardian this morning has a piece on the chilly state of what it calls ‘Anglo-Russian’ relations. The ‘Anglo’ word rings strange in this context these days. It appears to make England the focus of such problems while having nothing to say about the surely similar and weighty responsibilities of Scotland, Wales and […]
Moscow, Sunday 3 October 1993 At an Embassy picnic in the Moscow suburbs that afternoon news started to come through that the extended sit-in at the Russian Parliament by President Yeltsin’s opponents had turned violent. We jumped in our cars and returned to our various flats in central Moscow. I went to […]
