Michael Totten, an American writer who likes to follow the action very closely at first hand, comes clean on his many mistakes regarding the slow rise and fairly steep fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: Look: the Muslim Brotherhood is not a mysterious new group that no one knows […]
My latest piece for PunditWire looks at some of the feeble messages emanating from President Obama’s much heralded Cairo speech in 2009 and wonders if they missed the point. It notes that the vast crowds in Cairo demonstrating against the Muslim Brotherhood have been identifying the current US Ambassador by […]
Some US trials mutate into epic morality plays or vasty political metaphors that (it is said) are a Microcosm of Society. Especially when there is a ‘racial’ element involved (or said to be involved) the fairness or otherwise of the process and the eventual outcome is scrutinised in astonishing detail […]
Here is my latest piece for Commentator replying to Suzanne Moore in the Guardian who is fretting about what she sees as her loss of privacy and freedom at the hands of intrusive state eavesdroppers: Suzanne Moore genially admits that she has never given much thought to how much of […]
Every now and again an article comes along that assembles all one’s own inchoate half-thoughts into a free-flowing stupendous whole. This time Charles Moore delivers on the plight of wretched US über-leaker Edward Snowden: Acting in the name of a morality which disdains allegiance to the rule of national law, […]
Here is a nicely turned piece by David Mitchell at the Observer (yes, it still exists) about manners. I think they both sound horrible and they deserve one another. The more time people like that spend arguing with each other, the less chance any of the rest of us will […]
It is interesting how quickly these heroic WikiLeakers plummet into self-ridicule. Here is E Snowden moaning about his current situation: He says President Obama is putting pressure on the countries from which he has requested political asylum. “The president ordered his vice president to pressure the leaders of nations from […]
Long time no blog. I am in Warsaw to give masterclasses in Negotiation Skills to Polish officials. I have just spent the best part of an hour dictating into the computer someone fascinating observations on the latest revelations about Western electronic eavesdropping and the renewed political unrest in Egypt. All […]
You’re wondering what I have been up to in May. I have been rushing around like a whirling dervish. Thus: • a presentation on Difficult Conversations to the senior management of a distinguished school • a talk at my old school on Lessons for Life • fielding a group of […]
What a great story over at PunditWire about the mysterious life and suicide in 1913 of Colonel Alfred Redl, a senior officer in the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s army. Was he spying for Russia? This passage caught my eye: But the detectives had been favored by a second stroke of luck that […]
