9 November 2016 There is sometimes a silver lining to the darkest of clouds, and a case in point in connection with Donald Trump’s election victory might well be the injection of a virus into that sometimes useful but now out-of-control mode of diplomacy, summitry.
(Hart: Oxford and Portland, Oregon, 2016), 493pp. incl. index. ISBN 9781849464369 (hb), ISBN 9781509902781 (Epub). Q: ‘Why will there never be a coup d’état in Washington? A: Because there’s no American Embassy there.’ This old joke serves to highlight the belief – entrenched deeply in poor, weak states – that diplomatic missions too often meddle [...]
29 June 2016 The best known short work on diplomacy is still probably Harold Nicolson’s, Diplomacy.
(Bloomsbury: London, 2015). 652 pp. incl. index. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-2792-5 TPB: 978-1-4088-2793-2 ePub: 978-1-4088-4944-6[ buy this book ] I thought to review this book because I had enjoyed the spy novels of John le Carré and, having introduced a chapter on secret intelligence into the latest edition of my textbook and mentioned him in it [...]
25 March 2016 The judgment of Mr Justice Hayden on 8 February 2016 in Estrada v. Jufalli would have established a dangerous precedent if upheld.
12 January 2016 On 2 January there were well-publicised attacks on Saudi missions in Iran by mobs angered by the execution of the important Shia cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.
(The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 2014), 524pp. incl. index. ISBN 978-I-4696-1763-3 (cloth); ISBN 978-I-4696-1764-0 (ebook) This book went to press after the much-publicised handshake between US president Barack Obama and Cuban president Raul Castro at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela in December 2013 – but before their historic, simultaneous announcements a [...]
17 April 2015, with 2020 post script Is it a waste of time producing an index for a book when lengthy works are appearing more and more in searchable electronic format?
17 April 2015 The American Academy of Diplomacy has just released a major report called ‘American Diplomacy at Risk’,
(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 [...]
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?
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.,
(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 [...]
12 December 2013 Why am I self-publishing on this site?
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 [...]
11 November 2013 The revelations by Edward Snowden, supplemented by aerial photography, have merely highlighted what has long been known to some
(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 [...]
(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 [...]
(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 [...]
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.
