Geoff Berridge

About G.R. Berridge

This author has not yet filled in any details.
So far G.R. Berridge has created 121 blog entries.

The Demilitarization of American Diplomacy: Two cheers for striped pants

(Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2014), pp. 88 (incl. index). ISBN 10: 1137298545 / ISBN 13: 9781137298546 The trenchant contribution to this subject of the outstanding American scholar-diplomat Laurence Pope is published in Palgrave’s ‘Pivot’ series of short books designed to be brought out quickly. Its contents list and other details, including numerous well-deserved plaudits, can be [...]

Road maps for careful diplomats

27 January 2014 The ‘road map’ metaphor in important international negotiations, on which I dwelt at some length in the chapter called ‘Diplomatic Momentum’ in my textbook, is alive and well, and why not?

‘Soft power’ is nothing more than influence

17 January 2014 The term soft power (and its siblings hard power and smart power), employed to embrace a particular category of resources of potential power, originated in the stable of Joseph S. Nye, Jnr.,

Radio Free Europe: An insider’s view

(New Academia Publishing: Washington, DC, 2013), pp. 139 (incl. index). ISBN 978-0-9886376-8-9. [Buy this book] James F. Brown, who held joint British-American citizenship and died in 2009, spent 27 years at the Munich home of Radio Free Europe (RFE), rising to the post of director in 1978. However, uncomfortable with the aggressive tone he was [...]

Diplomatenleben

Akteure, Schauplätze, Zwischenrufe – Ein Lesebuch 2013. 436 S. Geb. CHF 48.00 / EUR 39.50 ISBN 978-3-0340-1206-5. [buy this book] A must-have for German-speaking students of Swiss diplomacy (and diplomacy generally) since the Second World War is Dr. Max Schweizer’s recently published Diplomatenleben. This contains 60 texts – mostly in German – written by career [...]

Embassy attics and roofs

11 November 2013 The revelations by Edward Snowden, supplemented by aerial photography, have merely highlighted what has long been known to some

Last Man Standing: Memoirs of a political survivor

(Pan Macmillan: London, 2013), pp. 582 (incl. index). ISBN 978-1-4472-2276-7. [buy this book] [Kindle ed] Jack Straw was the ablest and wisest of Tony Blair’s foreign secretaries and served in this capacity from 2001 until he was ungratefully dumped without warning by his leader in 2006. Afterwards he hit the headlines by courageously publishing his [...]

British Diplomacy and the Descent into Chaos: The career of Jack Garnett, 1902-19

(Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2012), 280 pp (incl. index). ISBN 978-0-230-34897-4. [buy this book] [Kindle ed] I am in favour of biographies of relatively obscure individuals like Jack Garnett because there are plenty of them on the famous; moreover, studies of this kind often turn up interesting details (including how the famous were seen from the [...]

Transformational Diplomacy after the Cold War: Britain’s Know How Fund in Post-Communist Europe, 1989-2003

(Routledge: London and New York, 2013), 224 pp. (incl. index). ISBN13: 978-0-415-69203-8 (hbk). ISBN13: 978-0-203-38158-8 (ebk). [buy this book] This is the long awaited history of the Know How Fund (KHF) produced by the recently retired Foreign and Commonwealth Office historian Keith Hamilton. Like other FCO ‘internal histories’, it was initially written ‘to provide background [...]

Expeditionary diplomacy

13 January 2013 A lot was beginning to be heard about ‘expeditionary diplomacy’ before the disaster at US ‘Special Mission Benghazi’ on 11 September 2012, somewhat less since.

21st Century Diplomacy: A practitioner’s guide

(Continuum: London and New York, 2011), 372pp (incl. index). ISBN: 9781441168382. Available in pb at £19.99. [buy this book] Kishan Rana is a man of lengthy and varied experience in the Indian Foreign Service, ending his career as ambassador to Germany. Since then he has spent many years as a globe-trotting trainer of junior diplomats [...]

Economic Diplomacy: India’s experience

(CUTS International: Jaipur, 2011), 285pp. (incl. index). ISBN 978 81 8257 139 6. Kishan Rana is a widely published former Indian ambassador and Bipul Chatterjee, his co-editor, is the deputy executive director of the Indian NGO, CUTS International http://www.cuts-international.org/ , the publisher of this book. Both editors are also trained economists. Their volume consists of [...]

The Practice of Diplomacy: Its evolution, theory and administration

2nd ed (Routledge: London and New York, 2011), pp. 317 (incl. index). [buy this book] [Kindle ed] First published in 1995, the long-awaited second edition of this valuable textbook on the history of diplomacy has at last appeared. The first chapter has been expanded to include non-European traditions, and a wholly new chapter has been [...]

Five best books on diplomacy

25 July 2010 On 5 July 2010, at the beginning of a week devoted to ‘Diplomacy’ by the ‘Five Best Books on Everything’ site, I was interviewed on my own choice of the five best books on this subject.

Diplomats at War: British and Commonwealth diplomacy in wartime

(Martinus Nijhoff: Leiden and Boston, 2008), pp. 304 (incl. index). ISBN 978 90 04 16897 8 In their Preface, the editors of Diplomats at War say that the two world wars in the twentieth century had a “catalytic impact upon the practice of diplomacy”; among other things, they continue, this produced “an unprecedented revolution” in [...]

The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell diaries

(Hutchinson: London, 2007), pp. 794, incl. index. ISBN 9780091796297 Until his resignation amid huge controversy in August 2003, Alastair Campbell was Tony Blair’s official spokesman and director of communications and strategy – ace spin doctor, closest confidante, and constant travelling companion. His diaries have probably been mined chiefly for their astonishing revelations about the internal [...]

Twentieth-Century Diplomacy: A Case Study of British Practice, 1963-1976

(Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2008), pp. 224, incl. index. ISBN 978-0-521-83916-7 Some years ago, John Young, Professor of International History at the University of Nottingham and long-serving Chair of the British International History Group, turned his thoughts and research in the direction of diplomatic procedure. This is the first monograph to be the product of [...]

Go to Top