Last week I attended the annual FCO remembrance ceremony held in November each year to honour FCO diplomats and colleagues who have been killed while on duty. I try to attend each year, as my friend and colleague Charles Morpeth was killed in a helicopter crash in Bosnia in 1997 […]
Yesterday my Sunday was interrupted by a request from RT-TV (Russia’s answer to the BBC’s world broadcasts) to take part in a programme talking about the Eurozone in general and Italy in particular. As they asked nicely and as it was not too far to the BBC Oxford studio where the […]
We mere taxpayers suspect in our dark hearts that a formidable industry has grown up around the ‘climate change’ issue, with all sorts of organisations big and small depending on state handouts to survive, and so frothing up the climate issue regardless of the facts to make sure that those handouts […]
Here is a handy one-stop-shop for most of my articles for DIPLOMAT magazine. It includes a link to my latest piece on Diplomatic Drafting and Wikileaks: When I was Ambassador in Poland, the FCO published a fat volume of diplomatic despatches from the 1950s and 1960s, so I could see […]
In case readers here have missed it, my second Telegraph Blog contribution: Most people reading this website will have been brought up to believe that "liberal democracy" is a natural state of affairs. It trundles along in the background for the British public as for the Foreign Office, without needing […]
As readers here know, the Spiegel Online site is a fine way to find thoughtful pieces on the goings-on in Europe from a German perspective. Try these two for size. The first is an interview with Polish Central Bank Governor Marek Belka (who served for a while as a technocrat Prime Minister […]
Most readers of this website are interested in one way or another in ‘foreign affairs’. As I have described on different occasions here, the heart of international diplomacy is the state. That idea in its modern form emerged from the Peace of Westphalia. Here are some passages from my 2009 […]
Wearing my ADRg Ambassadors hat I was in London on Tuesday to give a workshop to a prominent law firm on The Psychology of Negotiation. The people who attended spend much of their time drafting the legal clauses needed to give effect to deals already done or in prospect. They nonetheless […]
Alert! Google! An email has arrived from someone claiming to be a "Google Accounts Trust & Safety Authenticator": We regret to inform you that, starting from November 2011, Your Account will no longer allow you to send or welcome messages, files and pages due to malicious and spy wares activities detected on […]
In 1969, in her seminal work On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross eloquently detailed the five stages of dying – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance. It remains one of the most important contributions to our understanding of the final phase of life and will do much to explain […]
