Opinion

Libya: It’s All Tony Blair’s Fault!

What drivel is gushing out now from assorted progressives, variously blaming Tony Blair, the Blair Doctrine and his ‘hypocrisy’ for propping up Gaddafi. See this embarrassment posted by Channel 4 by self-styled Gurublog. And this even worse posting at Liberal Conspiracy by Claude Carpentieri: Imagine if you had a quid each time […]

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Libyan Ambassadors Resign In Protest! And ..?

It’s great news that two high-profile Libyan Ambassadors have leaped screaming from the burning deck of fast-sinking Libyan diplomacy. Isn’t it?

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Arab Uprisings – Meet Royal Weddings

Yesterday I was invited at a full seven minutes’ notice to discuss live on LBC with James Max an interesting question. Namely isn’t it disgraceful that invitations to the Royal Wedding have gone out to various Arab monarchs who currently are busy shooting their own people? Given that taxpayers’ money […]

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Civilisation’s Killer Apps

Twitter steered me to a fascinating (and not unsympathetic) Guardian interview with Niall Ferguson who is cranking out another TV series, this time on Civilisation: The West and the Rest. Thus: "The book is partly designed so a 17-year-old boy or girl will get a lot of history in a very […]

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Arab Uprisings: The Limits of Diplomacy

A long post. Go and grab a coffee. Right at the very very start of this blog in January 2008, I wrote about one of most vivid pieces of work in the FCO, my paper about MTS and Non-MTS back from 1984 in Belgrade. Here’s the link. The idea was […]

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W-Wa Jeziorki

This is the relaxing blog of Michael Dembinski, musing on life from the vantage-point of an intriguing Warsaw suburb. Here is a clever idea he’s had: to find photographs from contemporary Poland somehow suggesting life under communism, as if nothing has changed. And his blogroll led me to Jacek Koba, […]

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Crimes Against English

Are closely and efficiently monitored here: I wasn’t amused to spend an hour this morning waiting for a bus that didn’t arrive. But I was amused after I gave up, went home and checked the Thames Travel website. Please be aware there are severe delays to our services due to […]

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The Ultimate Peeping, Humming Tom

Is fluttering in your general direction. Keep your curtains and ventilator shafts firmly closed.

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Egypt: Fantasy v Reality

You can always rely on the hard-left Seumas Milne in the Guardian to articulate the far opposite of what any normal person is thinking – a handy public service he gives us here, helping us all formulate our thoughts so precisely in opposition to his. Click on the picture above his latest article […]

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Middle East Oppression: Myriad Swirling Sparks Of Resistance

Iran hangs two activists who joined last year’s street protests and distributed images of them on the Web and (the horror) chanted slogans. Up the road in Syria a 19-year old woman blogger has been sent to prison for five years for spying: The judge did not give evidence or details […]

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