Here is a deft essay by Stephen T Asma on the role played by monsters (and Zombies!) in helping us deal with real-life extreme people and situations: You can’t know for sure how you will face a headless zombie, an alien face-hugger, an approaching sea monster, or a chainsaw-wielding psycho. Fortunately, you’re […]
An eruption of peace, or something, in Honduras. The issue will be how far ‘President’ Zelaya, if he is briefly restored to office, can manage to manoeuvre anything other than a polite handover to his successor after the forthcoming elections. If these elections do pass off peacefully, Mr Micheletti can be […]
Update: Welcome co-conspirators. Guido is on the case. * * * * * The Labour Party are now officially making a total fool of themselves over Michal Kaminski. Young British diplomats are taught that it is poor technique (and, worse, stupid) to quote someone’s words from a magazine without checking that that […]
News just in from New York on a new UN Resolution We the Peoples of the United Nations Noting the fact the universal human right that people may and indeed do travel from country to country on business, which means that they do not need to be brutalised en route; Recalling […]
I have just spent a grim two days getting to Katowice and back, and am poised to collapse from exhaustion. So no hard-core blogging tonight. BUT, since I am now officially in Living Dead mode, I offer you another must-read. Go and get a drink and set aside twenty minutes […]
Update: since I pointed out the egregious mistake on the FCO website as below, the error has been corrected. Glad to see that someone is reading this blog with an eagle eye. But I’ve left the original blunder quote up for the sake of accuracy. * * * * * The FCO […]
The chattering classes have chattered furiously about the appearance of the populist/nationalist/racist British National Party leader Nick Griffin on a BBC political panel debate. I watched a few minutes, then jumped channel to watch some of an inane modern vampire film (Blade) which turned out to be so clunky that I […]
Folks. Drop what you are doing and spend just a few minutes to look at this magnificent, grim tirade from Anna Racccoon on the history and workings of the Court of Protection in England – a creepy and (she asserts) stagnantly dirty and unjust legal backwater inherited from days of […]
The looming entry into force (or not) of the Lisbon Treaty will bring to the fore all the fascinating questions of how and where the EU exercises its new ‘foreign policy’ capability. First things first. Who gets which jobs? And even above that: who decides? Genuinely tricky and interesting from […]
A busy day researching for an article in DIPLOMAT the manifold examples of people entering Embassies to seek refuge. The article is prompted by the tragi-comic opera scenes of former President Zelaya as impertinently parked in the Embassy of Brazil in Honduras. As one unimpressed Brazilian diplomat has put it to me, […]
