A few weeks ago I spotted on Twitter that LSE wanted more book reviewers. Within an hour I was signed up, and a few days later my first book appeared. Economic Gangsters by American professors Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel: Here is my first LSE review of it, just up: So […]
Remember the resounding spanking the Serbian legal authorities received in a London court over their attempt to extradite former Bosnian leader Ejup Ganic to Belgrade on war crimes charges? Now they are trying their luck in the Austrian courts. Former Yugoslav army general Jovan Divjak has been arrested in Austria on […]
Dominique Moisi is a clever and agreeable French intellectual. I met him once over lunch. Here he is, bewailing what he sees as the professional limitations of diplomats who fail to see convulsions coming: In the name of “realism,” diplomats and foreign-policy strategists are naturally conservative. Indeed, it is no […]
Update: welcome Guido readers Imagine you are William Hague or Hillary Clinton, pressed with a real sense of wanting to Do Something to help the Libyan masses. You draw a noisy stick across the bars of the FCO/State Department cage to rouse the bemused and sulky inmates, and demand ideas for action. […]
Exhibit A: Trust: the behavioural challenge PwC Point of View paper, Oct 2010 Exhibit B: The Rational Optimist Let’s start with Exhibit A, a recent paper put out by PwC which looks at the role of Trust in corporate culture. Underpinning the analysis is the “ethicability” methodology advanced by Prof Roger Steare, a fellow Business and […]
Disclosure note: John Sawers and I have known each other since we worked together in South Africa in the twlight years of apartheid. * * * * * Here on the SIS website is the full (and presumably authorised) text of Sir John Sawers’ speech this morning. The very fact […]
The tragic death in Afghanistan of aid worker Linda Norgrove as US Special Forces closed in, seconds away from rescuing her, makes us think about Negotiation again. At the International Bar Association annual conference in Vancouver last week I heard various people say that some major corporations were changing course, […]
Anne Perkins at the Guardian muses on the fact that new Labour Party leader Ed Miliband’s private life is no longer so private: Hardly had the world learned the non-secret information that Ed Miliband’s partner, the barrister Justine Thornton, was not also his wife, than a trawl through the birth […]
I have not been past Arts & Letters Daily recently, but it continues to carry a fine range of links. See this one at the NY Times about Truthiness and Proofiness – different forms of approaching or presenting arguments in a specious or dishonest way. Truthiness: “the quality of preferring concepts […]
A powerful essay by Angelo Codevilla looking closely at the dominant ruling class in the USA: Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at […]
