Here I am again, this time quoted in the Daily Telegraph on the always interesting subject of Balkan apologies: Charles Crawford, a former British ambassador to Belgrade, said the language used by Mr Nikolic represented a drastic change from his previous questioning of the scope of the atrocity. Coming a […]
Here’s my Commentator piece on that important Serbia/Kosovo/EU deal. Thus: Kosovo did better on symbolism than substance. It won agreement that Serbian officials in the municipalities concerned would henceforth be paid by Pristina, not Belgrade, and come under Pristina’s overall legal and political authority. And by the very fact of […]
Here is a towering example of modern American freewheeling public speaking. Bruce Sterling shares with us in a ramblingly insightful way all sorts of ideas and insights about technology and its impact on us. This sort of thing would shrivel and die if you attempted to write it down in advance. […]
My own meetings with Margaret Thatcher are described at the Commentator: My final substantive meeting with her came in 2009 at a small private dinner in London. She was frail but on lively form, making many religious references. There was a cheering consensus that Jesus had been ‘sound’ in his […]
Many years ago when I was at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy I had an American friend call Jim Wasserstrom, a lively quirky character. And he is continuing to be lively and quirky, to the point taking on the United Nations and its policies on people who reveal […]
The FT has an interesting but perhaps rather mischievous piece (££) by Kishore Mahbubani (distinguished dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore) that argues for President Obama learning from centuries of wise diplomatic practice by ‘picking up the phone’ to talk […]
Sydney Kentridge QC is at last retiring. Here is a Wikipedia summary of his remarkable legal career. And here is my account of watching him in action in Bloemfontein back in 1988, when the case of the Sharpeville Six (six Africans sentenced to death for the ‘common purpose’ murder of […]
One of the themes of this blog is the idea of Uncertainty (and indirectly Causation) and how policy responds to it. Take this example: … insofar as this new set of norms or something like them come into force, they will have Consequences. Some of those will, as defined by […]
My new piece at Commentator on how these new press ‘regulations’ might or might not tackle ‘egregious practices’: So we have no lack of sanctions in this area, formal and informal. Just as we have the strictest laws against killing people. Yet in a country of some 60 million people […]
Back from sharing with the Croatian Diplomatic Academy some training thoughts on Lobbying and Negotiating in the European Union. With the Cyprus drama helpfully unfolding before our startled eyes. These fiendishly complex financial/banking negotiations are impossible for normal people to follow, although anyone following my Twitter feed will have seen […]
