Tuesday, November 3, 2015

"What am I good at/for?" - a SWOT approach

›
Readers know that one of the few blogs I regularly check is the contrarian one of another Scot who worked in Uzbekistan (as British Ambass...
Monday, November 2, 2015

How Change Happens

›
Yesterday’s post was sparked off by a book and a paper with this title. Kzarnic’s paper was written in 2007 (although I came across onl...
Sunday, November 1, 2015

When will they ever learn?

›
“Change” is one of these words that has had me salivating for half a century. According to poet Philip Larkin, “ Sexual intercourse bega...
Thursday, October 29, 2015

Confession Time

›
Apologies to my loyal readers for my (abnormally) long silence of the past month…I made the mistake of collecting and reflecting on this...
Saturday, September 26, 2015

The World Of Yesterday

›
A month ago I wrote about the art of the memoir ….listing some of the more memorable examples for me of that genre of writing. In the p...
Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Fatalism - democracy's default position?

›
I have become a sucker in recent years for “intellectual histories” – what you might call “stories about stories” - or trying to identif...
Saturday, September 5, 2015

How Sofia opened Robert Conquest's Eyes

›
Robert Conquest – who died last month at the age of 98 – was the best known British investigator in the post-war period of the true scale ...
Thursday, September 3, 2015

Carbon Democracy

›
Those of us who try to keep up with things have piles of books on the key subjects of the day - "global warming", "end of o...