While I am away, read this wonderful interview with Camille Paglia. She never fails to challenge = and dance gleefully on her crushed enemies. So many wonderful lines: My clashes with other feminists began immediately. For example, it was 1970 or 1971, there was a feminist conference at the Yale […]
Blogging and generally thinking something interesting continues to be meagre these days, as I rush from one masterclass to another. Last week it was back to Warsaw for two days of Drafting Skills and Negotiation Skills. Tomorrow back to Vienna for another Negotiation class at the IAEA. The IAEA is a […]
My latest piece at DIPLOMAT has another gallop round some of the issues surrounding Mass and Velocity in diplomacy: The EU’s common foreign policy is particularly prone to piling on Mass but losing Velocity. Lots of European countries intoning the same policies, but struggling to take decisions to implement any […]
I’m sure that these heroic tweaks would make some difference to my own laboured blogging efforts. But, frankly, I just can’t be bothered. It all looks a bit too desperate somehow.
Responding to my piece pondering the calamitous performance of Ed Miliband, long-time reader Nigel Sedgwick offers some excellent points on electoral reform in the UK. Posted previously as a comment, but worth looking at properly: Charles writes: “Here in the United Kingdom our “first past the post” voting system produces […]
Over at Diplomatic Courier in Washington is a new edition looking at various aspects of global food issues. Including my piece on Food and Diplomacy: Where better to start pondering the global politics of food than in China, some 2500 years ago? The adviser to Duke Wen of Wei noted […]
In case you have been missing me, I have been on the road. First at this year’s Dubrovnik Diplomatic Forum in Croatia. Then back at IAEA (in Vienna) on Leadership Skills. Dubrovnik is of course splendid, if not quite as affordable as it used to be. As for the Forum, the event […]
The UK general election takes place soon. In years gone by I used to follow every twist and turn of the elections process. Now? Not so much. Some sort of strange fragmentation is happening, so that our trusty mainly two-party system erodes into something that might well be more ‘democratic’ […]
This one is interesting. Just when we thought that nothing else in the wider Balkan region could astonish us, up pops a brand new country. No, not Kosovo. Not Vojvodina. Not even Eastern Republika Srpska. Liberland! The basic ingenious idea is that, as luck has it, there is a tiny patch […]
Here is a good example (video plus text) of how to deliver a speech using consecutive interpreting: short, sharp sentences. This rather diminishes the sense of the flow of the argument, but it (crucially) keeps up the sense of conversation with the audience. See Speechwriting for Leaders where I explain this […]
