It’s always worth reading anything written by the prolific and perceptive Walter Russell Mead. Here he is on how we need to invent Liberalism 5.0: Briefly, the idea is that after World War II America was organized around a group of heavily regulated monopoly and semi-monopoly companies. AT&T was the […]
Now and again this site alludes to my brief glory days as a chess player, or at least an avid chess follower. So yesterday I was pleased to be invited by Grandmaster Nigel Short to the 2012 London Chess Classic at Olympia. This huge event features all sorts of different […]
Check out this fascinating article about the surging business opportunities in Houston for research into better energy solutions. Link good ideas with creativity and some money and let the Invisible Hand do the rest. Talking of which, look at this wonderful combination of ideas and vision in Australia – using […]
Having progeny of my own wending their way through ‘education’ and exams, I am struck by how little it has changed since I was their age, apart from the expected standards of writing/grammar and language learning being clearly lower these days than, say, 30 years ago. Why is this? Various […]
Back from the crazy dynamism of Hanoi to the somewhat less than crazy dynamism of rural Oxfordshire. While pulling together some pictures for a presentation next week on Moral Dilemmas in Diplomacy, I rummaged around in the Internet for images of the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics. I was the British […]
Over at Slate Farhad Manjoo has second thoughts about the iPhone 5 – and regrets his earlier cynicism: I’ll go even further: When I pick up the iPhone 5 and examine it closely, I find it difficult to believe that this device actually exists. The iPhone 5 does not feel like […]
One of the point of this blog is that I write in detail only about things I know something about. So if you want detailed analysis of politics in Latin America or Sri Lanka or Nigeria (and above all in the Middle East) you’ll just have to go somewhere else. […]
My latest piece for the Commentator looks at the way we have relied either on gold or politicians to give us Honest Money down the ages (almost invariably with disastrous results in the latter case), and wonders whether the time is coming to create a new form of money based instead […]
An interesting and instructive visit to Riga for this year’s Riga Conference. Thoughts. First, Riga itself. Latvia took an enormous (and partly self-imposed) hit as the Euro zone crisis began, opting for radical austerity measures. Views now differ. Yes, the economy is growing once again at a pretty good rate. […]
Here is my Telegraph Blogs piece on the terrible attack of the US Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens: There is no easy diplomatic response to such atrocities. Blaming the host country for poor security does not go far – usually they are as appalled as the rest of us at […]
