Geoff Berridge

About G.R. Berridge

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So far G.R. Berridge has created 117 blog entries.

Trump and Darroch

9 July 2019 All observers know that what the British Ambassador to the United States, Sir Kim Darroch, said about Donald Trump and his White House in secret, classified messages to the Foreign Office is true.

Diplomatic Notebooks 1, 1958-1960: The view from Ankara

Zeki Kuneralp, Diplomatic Notebooks 1, 1958-1960: The view from Ankara, ed. and introduced by Sinan Kuneralp (The Isis Press: Istanbul, 2018), ISBN 978-975-428-616-8/978-975-428-617-5, pp. 342, incl. name and analytical index. Publisher's page Zeki Kuneralp (1914-1998) was one of Turkey’s most gifted, well-liked and influential diplomats of the second half of the twentieth century. This book, dispassionately [...]

Petition on Russia and BREXIT

1 March 2019 It has long been suspected that Vladimir Putin’s government, in part via the agency of the Russian Embassy in London, gave covert support to the campaign that secured the narrow victory for the Brexiters in the June 2016 referendum in the UK.

British Diplomats on Brexit

14 February 2019 It’s always been blindingly obvious but it needed saying again, and has just been succinctly stated once more by more than 40 former, senior British ambassadors and high commissioners in a letter to Theresa May,

The Emirates, SIS – and Brexit

2 December 2018 Like many others, I heaved a sigh of relief when I learned that Matthew Hedges had been pardoned and allowed to return home.

The inevitability of a bad Brexit deal for Britain

24 November 2018 Predictably enough, the hard right-wing nationalists in Parliament are pounding their chests and claiming that Theresa May’s government could have got a much better deal on Brexit.

Diplomacy, Satire and the Victorians

11 August 2018 This is the new title under which DiploFoundation has re-launched my biography of E. C. Grenville-Murray on the ISSUU platform.

Donald Duck could have got Kim to Singapore

13 June 2018 Out of sheer despair, I have been silent for a long time on Trump’s new style of ‘diplomacy’, as well as on the dangerous clowning of Boris Johnson at Britain’s Foreign Office.

Enter the Stupid Party, Exit Diplomacy

27 November 2017 John Stuart Mill called the nineteenth century Tory Party in England the ‘stupidest’ party but he would probably not have hesitated for long in abandoning this relativistic statement as too charitable to its modern, Brextremist variant.

Death of author of WHAT DIPLOMATS DO

12 November 2017 I record here, belatedly, the death in September of my friend, Sir Brian Barder, former British diplomat and author of one of the best books on diplomacy. There were very good obituaries of him in the British press and to these I added a lengthy personal footnote on the University of [...]

Boris (‘the horse’) Johnson must go – Update

30 August 2017 On 22 August (2017) John Kerr published an article in the London Evening Standard that to all intents and purposes was a clear call for the dismissal of Boris Johnson as British foreign secretary.

The Summer Capitals of Europe, 1814-1919

(Routledge, 2017), 342pp (incl. index). ISBN: 978-0-415-79245- (hbk); 978-1-315-21170-1 (ebk) This is an original work, meticulously researched, rich in detail, and written in a clear and – here and there – refreshingly pungent style. Soroka is a Russian scholar but at ease in English. The Summer Capitals begins with over 100 pages devoted to a [...]

Curing the Sick Man: Sir Henry Bulwer and the Ottoman Empire, 1858-1865

(Republic of Letters: Dordrecht, 2011) ISBN 9789089790569, pp. 269 incl. index This is the first book of a very promising young historian. Laurence Guymer, who is head of the Department of History at Winchester College and a research associate in the School of History at the University of East Anglia, has produced a biography of [...]

Trump and Putin: that ‘secret meeting’ at the G20 dinner

19 July 2017 Even the most cautious headline – ‘previously undisclosed meeting’ – describing the informal conversation between the American and Russian leaders during the dinner for the G20 summiteers and their spouses in early July suggests that it was in some way extraordinary.

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