Poised as I was yet again to waste time and scour my year’s output to find some items worthy of entry in the 2013 Orwell Prize for Bloggers, I then discovered that the prize for Bloggers has been suspended! See the rather lame explanation here. It seems to argue that […]
The great American jurist Robert Bork has died. Here is an eloquent summary of his influence – and the shameful attacks on him by Ted Kennedy among others – by Roger Kimball. I once had the great pleasure to meet Robert Bork and his wife. He told me about his […]
My new piece at the Commentator explores the wilder shores of the UK’s Health and Safety neurosis in the context of how we look at ‘risk’ – and asks rhetorically whether the way the Americans balance the risk of guns against the freedom to own them is really so unreasonable. […]
Now and again I have talked here about the curious idea that people ‘deserve’ agreeable (to them) outcomes. Here is a classic: Redknapp’s first meeting with Tony Fernandes, the owner, after the match, a positive one. “It keeps us in there,” Redknapp said. “If we hadn’t won today it would […]
Now and again this site alludes to my brief glory days as a chess player, or at least an avid chess follower. So yesterday I was pleased to be invited by Grandmaster Nigel Short to the 2012 London Chess Classic at Olympia. This huge event features all sorts of different […]
The Climate Summit at Copenhagen was a supreme example of collective European negotiating incompetence: Copenhagen was a startling example of how this big tent approach to agreeing global issues is unworkable. It predictably slumped into an uncontrolled haggle which as each day passed grew more and more detached from respectable […]
I am gearing up to give a coaching/skills session next week at a school on the general theme of Difficult Conversations. Notably with other colleagues – but especially with parents. It turns out that I am not the only one sending a stream of idiotic and abusive emails to schools […]
An aspect of Mount Everest that has stayed well away from my sphere of reference – until now – is what happens to those who die in the effort of making it to the top and back down again The harsh conditions far up the mountain make it impossible to […]
Here I am at Commentator on the ghastly Leveson Report: First, the Leveson report fails to grasp the most important feature of the current ‘press’ scene, namely that the industrial model of newspapers is busily dying. We are moving back (or more precisely forward) to something much more like the […]
Here’s one to ponder. Purely hypothetical of course. Say you are an ex-diplomat turmned consultant of no little erstwhile seniority, and you are asked to help with a significant business problem involving a foreign government and a private corporation. You are happy in principle to help the corporation move the […]
