How dazzling is President Obama? So dazzling that he didn’t merely give a dazzling inaugural speech. Any old timeserving hack could do that. Instead, he had the sheer genius to give a flat dull speech full of the usual shopworn boilerplate. Mark Steyn. Who else? When I try to explain […]
I have mentioned Dick Holbrooke several times. See eg this early posting about his sheer physical presence. And this later one when Radovan Karadzic was arrested. Now he has been appointed by President Obama to lead US policy on Pakistan and Afghanistan. That lot should keep him busy. I attended […]
An animated discussion about our financial woes over dinner in Krakow, my colleague and I allocating core blame differently. He (accountant) blamed technical accountancy practices for allowing exotic transactions which gave paper profits increasingly detached from reality. I (former civil servant) blamed the government for not spotting the bigger picture […]
A sturdy piece by Harry Phibbs who got to the point about David Miliband’s misplaced informality and linked it to Blairish ‘anti-stuffiness’ before I did: In a triumph of style over substance, Blair declared a moral crusade against stuffiness in our domestic affairs. Not being addressed as Prime Minister was […]
Here are the entrants for the first Orwell Prize for blogs. I find myself on the list sandwiched between Charlotte Gore (Reluctant LibDem) and a splendid blog extolling the Greatness of Tony Blair, the rather one-dimensional subject-matter proclaimed with verve and gusto. Archbishop Cranmer may be hard to beat: stylish, […]
President Obama’s inauguration speech of course attracted huge interest. And intense analysis. See eg this breakdown of how often he used the words I, You, They and We. And this subtle look at it from the point of view of Greek rhetoric, pointing out pathos, bathos, logos and even anaphora […]
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.
UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband is having a thin time of it. His visit to India featured several apparent misjudgements (wrong tone on terrorism, ill-judged observations on Kashmir and an inappropriately Nu Labour matey conversational style with senior Indian interlocutors). See this vivid demolition job. Plus there is a claim […]
Trundling across Poland’s snowy steppes on the train from Warsaw to Krakow yesterday, I missed the Inauguration. As for George W Bush, Christopher Hitchens’ assessment is good enough for me: … it is the events of Sept. 11, 2001, that explain the transformation of George Bush from a rather lazy […]
Back when the Euro was launched, senior US economist Martin Feldstein annoyed a lot of people by warning that the Euro was likely to lead to dangerous new tensions in Europe and between the EU and USA. Here is a flavour of the argument: Since there is no major country […]
