See my latest DIPLOMAT article here. It recalls the amazing battle between the French and Spanish Ambassadors along the streets of London which left twelve people dead; Samuel Pepys’ diary recorded how London rejoiced at the outcome: ‘indeed we do naturally all love the Spanish and hate the French’. And this: Every […]
One of my jobs this week has been to take Crawf Minor to University for his Natural Sciences interview. They sent this bouncer down the pitch to him: You have a long steep icy slope. Two cylinders are at the top of the slope. One rolls down, one skids down. […]
In central London yesterday I walked past some of these odious so-called students. Some of them from the evergreen rent-an-idiot Socialist Workers tendency had mass-produced posters: We Demand Free Education The fine example of Cambridge student vandal Charlie Gilmour, rich and pampered beyond belief, shows us what ‘education’ does for […]
Have been running around, including appearing on a live BBC World Service programme World, Have Your Say on Wednesday which spent the best part of an hour looking at different issues of secrecy/privacy and the limits or not thereof. Here is the programme if you are interested – listen soon […]
Is hosted by the always feminist Philobiblon. Look out for the gloomy thoughts of Diamond Geezer on Olympic travel chaos in London in 2012 when the Games are on.
The real truth of the whole Wikileaks saga is that it shows US diplomats en masse doing first-class professional diplomatic work. (Update: Rupert Cornwall agrees). Getting out of the Embassy and meeting people, analysing all sorts of information, reporting it all back to HQ in good businesslike prose, often with sharp insights […]
Here I am, quoted in the Guardian a few days ago, on the interesting subject of the overlap between diplomacy and spying: "There is a degree of overlap. Diplomats, spies and journalists are all basically nosy people. They all want to find out things that are not generally known," said Charles […]
Just to note that, as the end of the year looms, I can report that whereas in 2009 some 15,000 visitors here spent from 30 minutes to an hour or more reading deeper into the site, this year that number has jumped to over 25,000 people. By far the largest […]
A generous link to this site from Tim Montgomerie at Conservative Home was posted while I was sunning myself in Mauritius. Tomorrow, the world.
Is England not corrupt enough to survive? Straight dealing in almost any international forum these days is utterly non-existant, says Simon Heffer Simon Heffer regularly gets furious with his sub-editors’ illiteracy* at the Telegraph. He can have another whack at them now. Thank goodness that Crawf Minor is battling on […]
