Off tomorrow to this year’s Riga Conference, the distinguished Northern Europe security and wider policy forum. My first time at this event. Plenty of meat on the menu, including legendary Polish economist and intellectual Lesek Balcerowicz on the subject of the Eurozone. I appear in full hoot at Night Owl […]
One of the wonders of modern life brought via one’s iPhone is to hear far-flung interviews with one’s favouritest musicians while walking the dog in the middle of nowhere. Here is Nick Lowe on Chicago radio WBEZ talking wittily about his music and his lifelong aversion to musical earnestness. (He […]
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 […]
One of the problems with teleprompters is that you the speaker can’t improvise easily. You’re stuck with the pre-agreed script loaded on to the machine. Those words scroll inexorably across your screen, and if you deviate from them it is not easy for the person doing the scrolling to fathom out what […]
The Browser points us to an interesting interview with Sophie Ratcliffe on PG Wodehouse: It’s the quality of his style and his jokes. For instance, “She came leaping towards me like Lady Macbeth coming to get first hand news from the guest room.” Or, “[He] clasped her to his bosom, […]
DIPLOMAT magazine has had a snazzy website upgrade. One result appears to be that for the time being you can’t find work by contributor (eg me) now. You have to scroll through each issue to see what has been posted on the site. Action is in hand to change that, I […]
Recently I gave a session to a group of feisty 12-year olds (incl Crawf Minima) on the general subject of Public Speaking. I hit upon a truly magnificent formula, drawing on the idea that it’s always good to take along a ‘thing’ to a talk to illustrate the point and […]
We mere Britishers tend not to follow in detail the goings-on in the USA, where a new literary genre has appeared – the Fantasy Autobiography, often wildly feted in the name of progressive causes. Here is Mark Steyn’s handy round-up of some superb examples which include, ahem, President Obama himself: His Kenyan grandfather was […]
How often do we hear that, especially on the Today programme? We face this problem – why doesn’t the government do something? Rarely is the case made is that we have these problems precisely because the government is ‘doing something’ – something absurd. And that by far the best thing […]
Back in distant 2008 I wrote about the vile N-word: What is the precise mechanism which makes people start to talk in arch post-modern jargon? Like this: Labour needs to provide a convincing new narrative if left-of-centre politics are to remain the driving force in Britain. Or this: Mr Brown […]
