Non-diplomatic folk may not know the different levels of visit for national leaders. These include Private: the leader visits another country for a family holiday (and may or may not have an affable pre-arranged lunch or other meetings with that country’s leader while there). Then there is Official (or Working): a […]
Here is my latest piece at PunditWire, describing how I dealt with pesky young professionals not paying full attention during my Drafting Skills class last week in Warsaw. The main feature of this one is, of course, the superlative extract from the famous account of how Bertie Wooster is stuck […]
Things have slackened off again here, what with one thing and another. But here is the hefty piece I wrote about Ukraine last week for the Daily Telegraph. To be precise, I did not write it. I dictated it into my iPad from my hotel room in Gjakova (also known […]
My latest piece for Telegraph Blogs looks in (very) broad terms at Ukraine: In 1994 the EU Ambassadors had a meeting in Moscow at which they opined on the then reforms under President Yeltsin. The Belgian Ambassador grumbled that Russia was just too big, too communist and too “Asian” to […]
An interesting old CIA analysis of Tito’s strangled Yugoslav grammar and pronuciation concluded that he probably was a Polish or Russian imposter. The CIA opined that this fact “does not matter a great deal” as his rise to world prominence occurred after any substitution. Evelyn Waugh famously fretted that Tito […]
As you can see, I have been reviving my flagging career as a Daily Telegraph blogger. This one prompted by the death of Sir Kenneth James (one of my distinguished predecessors as Ambassador in Warsaw) popp’d up this morning, remembering lost times at the Foreign Office : One key difference between […]
I expect that very few readers here have heard of Helena Wolinska-Brus. Here she is. A Polish Jewish woman (or even a Jewish Polish woman) who narrowly escaped death in the Warsaw Ghetto and went on to become a ruthless post-WW2 Stalinist prosecutor, sending various Polish patriots to their murky […]
Poland for many decades was carved up between the Tsarist Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Prussian Empire. How have the very different political and social cultures of those three areas affected Polish politics today? Here is an analysis that purports to show that current political attitudes among Poland’s people […]
Here I am after a long gap (spent trying to earn some money) back at Telegraph Blogs, offering my thoughts on the various EU Budget rows now unfolding: The EU has annual budget rows. But the big row comes around every seven years, when the so-called Financial Framework for the […]
Last week I had the pleasure of going to Blenheim Palace to watch Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski deliver a powerful speech about Europe – and the UK’s increasingly unhappy role in it. Here is the full text. Some extracts: While you are an important market for the rest of […]
