In response to my pieces earlier today about the FCO’s language training policies, this trenchant message has arrived from a reader (edited a tad for anonymity purposes and published here with the author’s consent): I read your blog and comments about the Telegraph’s article on the FCO’s foreign language abilities (or […]
Here’s a fine example of how high-level foreign language skills come in handy when the interpreter deliberately doesn’t translate what has been said to protect her boss from his own impatience: After Bosnia’s first post-conflict elections in 1996, the Contact Group Ambassadors led by High Representative Carl Bildt had to […]
Here is a scary piece at the Telegraph bewailing the supposed decline in British diplomats’ foreign language skills. Which draws on some information extracted from the FCO by a Parliamentary Question. And quotes me: Charles Crawford, the former British ambassador to Poland and a speaker of Serbian, Russian, Afrikaans and French has […]
Israeli superspy Jay Pollard – serving out the final years of his life prison sentence in the USA – is unwell. My own modest link to the Pollard story is here. Not to ignore here. Wikipedia blithely glosses over Pollard’s academic links to me, but the general explanation of what the […]
A gush of media reporting on the start of the conflict in Bosnia back in 1992. This one by Tim Judah (who knows his Balkans) is smart but maybe too optimistic. Yes, the likelihood of horrible inter-ethnic fighting has subsided. But is what we have now really good enough and, […]
Lordy! Boris Johnson, has, says the decorous newspaper, been involved in a foul-mouth rant against Ken Livingstone. By which they mean he used the F-word in denouncing Livingstone when they had an encounter in a lift at LBC. Yet run a word-search on the F-word in the Guardian and you […]
Here is what appears to be the first-ever speech by a UK Foreign Secretary (maybe the first-ever speech by any Foreign Minister) on consular work. And v effective it is too. I have written here about some aspects of consular work under Labour, not least the appalling Three Ps which […]
The general idea behind much of what is called ‘affirmative action’ or ‘diversity’ policy is to help boost the prospects of disavantaged groups. So, for example, in looking at academic potential for prospective students universities might ‘take into account’ wider factors beyond mere exam results, to help give a chance […]
You all are craving for a fine example of vacuous fawning over capitalism? Search no more. Here is my latest Commentator article exploring how Marx’s theory of Surplus Value applies to airport check-in procedures.
One Ann Kittenplan sees some sort of equivalence between ‘tax avoidance’ and benefit fraud: see her comments on my post about the moral vacuum that is Graham Norton, including: I do have a problem with unfairness… a) what are the relative costs to the economy of benefit fraud, tax avoidance, […]
