Over at DIPLOMAT magazine is my light-touch article looking at the whys and wherefores of ‘interfering in internal affairs’. My original draft was wittily called Where Diplomacy meets Gynaecology but for no obvious reason this web version is called Diplomacy Meets Affairs of the State, which alas makes little sense.
Being a serious former Ambassador Oliver Miles manages to give the lame FCO diplo-blogging genre the thrashing it richly deserves AND do so in an elegant Guardian article: Why do diplomats (and Whitaker’s article quotes some examples from Americans as well as the British) feel the need to let it […]
A reader from New York writes: I must add that I thoroughly enjoy your blogoir. I suspect it is the air of friendly exasperation that tints so much of what you write (can’t they just see?) that I find so engaging. I had never thought of my output in that […]
The Week too looks at the spy story Winners and Losers. And cites this site as giving one of the Best Opinions on the issues concerned.
The Observer gives us a savage critique of the looming disaster facing civilisation as we know it thanks to the massacres being proposed for the UK’s public sector by the new coalition government. More! It’s written by a senior civil servant. Anonymously. How senior, pray? Can’t be that senior or […]
In my eccentric Left phase as a student I got very depressed by a popular book by a young David Horowitz, a prominent American Leftist who railed at great length (460 pages) against the iniquities of Amerika and its unforgiving anti-communist foreign policy machinations. Not only was the USA surrounding the […]
As you all know from the great Frank Luntz, it’s not what you say … … it’s what they hear! And much of what they ‘hear’ comes from what they ‘see’ and ‘feel’. Thus the best speaker in the world will be undone if the audience see and remember him/her as the one who […]
Fascinating interview with Clay Shirky at the Guardian website, where all sorts of issues dealing with the impact of the Internet (especially on old-style media outlets such as newspapers and TV) are covered elegantly. Examples: When we talk about newspapers, we talk about them being critical for informing the public; […]
The Total Politics blog vote comes round again. Last year I slipped down the ratings. So maybe I’ll do better this time round. The voting regime is different (and better) this time. Entries are by email and have to include AT LEAST FIVE British blogs, listed in order of preference of […]
It’s a tiring job reading Tim Worstall’s blog every day, as he demolishes one idiotic idea after another, a fevered lumberjack in the wide leafy Forest of Nonsense felling tree after tree with mighty blows. Where does he find the energy? For a good example of another tree toppling to […]
