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.
August 11, 2018
June 13, 2018
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.
April 5, 2018
Intelligence officers in the present crisis between Russia and the West
5 April 2018 There is not a great deal I can add to what has already been written about this sorry business but, since I am working on a related project, it has pricked my interest.
November 27, 2017
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 [...]
August 30, 2017
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 [...]
July 19, 2017
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.
April 10, 2017
Tillerson, Russia and the return of ‘megaphone diplomacy’
10 April 2017 The Trump administration quickly declared its view – almost certainly correct – that the Syrian air force was responsible for the chemical attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun in northern Syria early last week.
March 27, 2017
The regrettable resilience of ‘resilience’
27 March 2017 Don’t you get fed up with the over-use of certain words and phrases?
A public diplomacy own goal for Trump’s State Department
17 March 2017 The US State Department used to be very good at keeping America’s own diplomatic correspondents abreast of foreign policy developments. It gave daily press briefings
In defence of the House of Lords
7 March 2017 Once more the House of Lords, the ‘upper’ chamber of the British Parliament, has shown itself to be on the side of common decency, not to mention economic prudence.
‘Guarded engagement’ with Russia means what?
5 March 2017 So Boris Johnson, Britain’s diplomatically inept, part-time foreign secretary (his other job is entertainment) is going to Moscow for talks with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.
Geneva Prenegotiations on Syria
5 March 2017 UN-led prenegotiations for a settlement of the Syrian civil war tragically seem once more to be going nowhere.
February 10, 2017
Political appointees: more trouble for Trump with the CIA?
10 February 2017 While studying documents on the ‘treaty of friendship’ signed between the State Department and the CIA in 1977, I came across a particularly interesting memo.
January 31, 2017
US diplomats revolt against Trump
31 January 2017 Radical changes of government have in the past often led to tension between the new regime and at least some of the state’s diplomatic servants at foreign posts,
The Trump-Russia Dossier cannot be dismissed lightly
12 January 2017 Published by BuzzFeed here, if this is fake news it was drafted by a master forger.
‘Who would want to be a diplomat now?’
9 January 2017 ‘Who would want to be a diplomat now? Civil servants are judged as though they are reality TV contestants, while reality TV stars have inherited the Earth.’ So writes one of the Guardian’s sharpest columnists,
December 10, 2016
The Embassy: A story of war and diplomacy
(Beaufort Books: New York, 2016), p. 376, incl. index. ISBN 9780825308253 This book tells the story of the vital role played by the US Embassy in Monrovia in helping to mediate an end to the brutal, 14-year civil war in Liberia in 2003. Its successful diplomacy was assisted by a popular yearning for peace, the [...]