Here is my latest article for DIPLOMAT magazine – a review of David Owen’s fine new book on the diplomatic origins of the First World War. Thus: Readers of Diplomat will enjoy – and be startled by – many details Lord Owen gives us about diplomacy as practised a century […]
This video resulted from a recent masterclass I gave in Public Speaking where Anna Baker was one of the participants. Not long into the class she said that she had been toiling for weeks on a major presentation to three hundred people that was looming in some ten days’ time. […]
As will be obvious to anyone reading this, the website has had a massive overhaul to bring it humming beautifully into something like an acceptable modern form. This is my first posting on the new site. I am doing it to check that I can master the simplest WordPress buttons […]
Things have slackened off again here, what with one thing and another. But here is the hefty piece I wrote about Ukraine last week for the Daily Telegraph. To be precise, I did not write it. I dictated it into my iPad from my hotel room in Gjakova (also known […]
Some of you may be wondering how to improve your written work. It’s either too long or too dense or not persuasive or just somehow too clunky and unengaging. Help is at hand. You can sign up with my new Guardian Masterclass for @guardianclasses: Professional Writing with Impact Course description […]
A few days ago I posted this piece from Diplomatic Courier about the hopeless public speaking performance by the French and German Foreign Ministers in Sarajevo in 1997 (emphasis added): Where did the two countries’ diplomats organizing this event get things wrong? Basically, neither the Ministers’ respective offices nor their […]
Here is my latest piece for PunditWire on the subject of Slippery Slopes. With added Quagmires and Boiled Frogs: Shock! The German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has floated the idea that the rise of so-called ‘Eurosceptic’ political parties in Europe could lead to WAR. He argued this week that the […]
I am locked in battle with the Royal Bank of Scotland over a footling issue with a credit-card. They sent me a card dated Jan 2014 that expires in Feb 2014. Shocking! Their Customer Service people have sent a long letter apologising for the letter and offering some small compensation […]
Here’s the next part of my e-discussion with Frances Coppola on Atlas Shrugged and what it all means: CC In Atlas Shrugged Dagny’s shooting of Rusty is, I agree, given a curious and opaque justification: “…a man who wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousness”. It seems to […]
I have opened a new writing flank with the fine US diplomatic publication Diplomatic Courier. Here is my first piece. It tells the tragic tale of the Franco-German speech disaster in Sarajevo in 1997, beginning as it mesans to continue: All happy speeches are alike. All unhappy speeches are different […]
