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31 January, 2026. My latest publication, called Ambassadors, Journalists and Spies: From ancient Greece to the present day, will shortly be available from DiploFoundation. All earnings from its sales will go to this non-profit organization, created in 2002 by the governments of Malta and Switzerland, as an expression of my gratitude for its support for this website over many years. The simplest way for me to explain what the volume is about is to reproduce here the Preface to the volume.

27 January, 2026. I heard this phrase for the first time way back in the late 1960s in a report from a friend about a fiery seminar debate between political sociologists in which a visiting speaker accused someone who attacked him of having this disposition. Since then I have often had occasion to observe it, particularly on the part of politicians at extreme ends of the political spectrum. But why is ignorance likely to encourage arrogance, which seems counter-intuitive and is more often associated with expertise?

23 January, 2026. Since rightly being denied the Nobel Peace Prize, President Trump has childishly avowed a greater interest in the exciting use of military power, most recently and idiotically in regard to the proposed annexation of Ice … sorry, Greenland, where the USA already has treaty rights to create bases. Perhaps thinking he might need to re-balance and simultaneously come up with another way of keeping the world’s attention, he has launched a ‘Board of Peace’.

10 December, 2025. As a long time supporter of the Arsenal, I’d been toying with this idea for some time. It became a firm decision after reading in The Guardian that football is on a rising tide of popularity in the USA and that the electrifying Zohran Mamdani, democratic socialist mayor-elect of New York, is a fellow supporter of the Gunners.

7 December, 2015. Release of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, November 2025, confirms that it’s the huge American Embassy in London that the Labour Government in the UK should be more worried about than the planned new Chinese Embassy.