I am whirring away on my Speechwriting book. It takes me back to this effort that I prepared back in 1986 for the then Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe. The opulent surroundings and fine nourishment of the annual Lord mayor’s Diplomatic Banquet were not an obvious choice for a speech on […]
What’s not to love about this Spam message? Can I simply just say what a relief to uncover a person that really understands what they are talking about on the net. You certainly know how to bring a problem to light and make it important. A lot more people need […]
Yesterday on my lonely dog-walk I listened to an iTunes U podcast presentation from Oxford University on the Theory of Arguments as part of a series on Critical Reasoning. I did not find the lecturer easy to follow, but then it’s not easy to explain simply entailment, causation, necessity and […]
I am 100% unfamiliar with the work of US writer Joan Didion, whose writing is apparently permeated by a ‘sense of anxiety and dread’. But here is a good short piece by Maria Popova about JD’s views on writing technique. I was struck by her (JD’s) fine explanation of why […]
Attentive readers will recall that I have been having an e-discussion with Frances Coppola about the morality of the Ayn Rand novels and their wider significance today. The second episode published over at the Commentator in January is here. The third episode is here. It features the train-crash from Atlas […]
When I was over in Moscow in late 2011 as an official observer of the Duma elections, I made my doomed trip to Nizhny Novgorod by train. Part of the fun was waiting at the large railway station in Moscow, where we passed the time having a go with air-guns […]
Rummaging around in my website I found this magnificent Islamist forgery that has been doing the global rounds for many years: a letter supposedly from Prime Minister John Major to FCO Minister of State Douglas Hogg urging him to be horrid to the Bosnian Muslims (aka Bosniacs). Here it is: […]
This one is mainly for US readers as everyone else on Planet Earth has seen it already. Astonishing for the babbling Spanish commentary. Plus the goal is quite good.
Remember back in December when I cantered to almost victory in a national Mediation Competition? The winner that day was Lori Pinkerton-Rolet. And since then we have been working to join forces to offer a joint mediation service aimed at the creative industries of all shapes and sizes (but of […]
The bombastic smirking of Russia’s Victory Day parades is on a quite new scale this year. And why not? How often these days does a country get to boast to itself that it has grabbed part of some other country’s territory and seemingly got away with it? How did we […]
