Sorry readers. An exhausting couple of days clearing out the parental garage. This old radio of mine emerged – a hefty but magnificent Pye Cambridge International. One of these cost a huge 42 guineas in 1954, the auspicious year of my birth. Not easy to say with any certainty what […]
Rummaging through my career files today I read again the 1997 letter to us from Diana, Princess of Wales expressing thanks for what the Embassy had done to help her on her visit to Bosnia to highlight the dangers of landmines – as it tragically turned out, the last public […]
RFE/RL has many excellent pieces on the less settled parts of Europe and beyond. Here is a gloomy piece about the current trends in former Yugoslavia, arguing that with so many other problems going on elsewhere the ‘international community’ is not gripping Balkanic divisons which are reappearing busily all over […]
"I can resist everything except temptation." Oscar Wilde for Minister of Culture in Albania?
Spiegel Online International carries all sorts of excellent pieces, beautifully written in or translated into English for a wider audience. This one about Islamic extremists in Sarajevo is thought-provoking. And not all the thoughts are positive: The obliteration of Israel is heralded in a torrent of words. "Zionist terrorists," the […]
My new observations on this ever-fascinating subject are in the latest Total Politics (free registration needed for the E-zine). See eg: Yeltsin’s Moscow before that (1993-96) was fascinating in big policy terms, but a grinding, debilitating place to live in. In late August the air abruptly went chilly as the Russian […]
Why does the EU work as it does? One Massive Point about the EU which tends to get lost is that it is all about the biggest member states giving exaggerated and unceasing reassurance to the smaller ones. This explains why the voting weights as per the current Nice Treaty […]
Craig Murray’s site links (approvingly) to a site busy collecting signatures in support of indicting Tony Blair for war crimes. And hurrah!, Noam Chomsky has signed up. As has uber-Darwinian Richard Dawkins, another person who seems to think that his lively insight in one area of science requires us to take very […]
The dreary saga of General Mladic rambles on. Successive Serbian governments have pressed the civilised world that it is not fair to hold Serbia’s European prospects hostage for one crazy war criminal. Some in the civilised world agree. Yet that argument goes the other way too. Why is one crazy man […]
Titoite Yugoslavia made a cornerstone of its ideology the notion of socialistic non-nationalistic Brotherhood and Unity (Bratstvo i Jedinstvo). As we know, it did not turn out too well. Good to see that fine tradition continuing thousands of miles away.
