Leicester’s global links
I headed on Wednesday to Leicester, for two events organised by the think tank the British Foreign Policy Group. One was an induction programme for its enthusiastic cohort of Student Ambassadors, a new...
View ArticleMad Day Out
This week is English Tourism Week, an annual celebration of the people, places and experiences which make holidays in England so great. I thought I would mark the occasion by blogging about my attempt...
View ArticleAcid Drops
When I first received the diagnosis of “reflux”, I was almost pleased. It had a commonplace sort of sound. I had feared worse. But what this really said is that I didn’t understand what reflux meant. I...
View ArticleWaxing Lyrical
Madame Tussauds is one of those attractions that Londoners tend to dismiss as aimed mostly at visitors to the city. And it is not the easiest of places to get in, as the successful navigation of a...
View ArticleFood and Power
The Oxford Food Symposium has not always held an obvious link to foreign policy, but diplomacy was there at its conception. It was co-founded by a diplomat named Alan Davidson, whose Foreign Office...
View ArticleThe Westminster Abbey Institute Fellows’ Programme
The splendid Gothic structure of Westminster Abbey dominates the southern side of Parliament Square. The nineteenth-century reconstruction by Charles Barry of the Palace of Westminster, home of the...
View ArticleIn praise of London’s parks
Brasilia’s City Park, named after Sarah Kubitschek, the spouse of the President responsible for the founding of the city in the late 1950s, covers an area of more than 900 acres. It has some impressive...
View ArticlePleased as Punch
We missed Special Guest Star Bobby Davro, who had opened the Hotham Park Country Fair in Bognor Regis, but watching the Punch and Judy show at the fair felt like a rite of passage for our five-year old...
View ArticleWhat is Chevening?
It was great to have the opportunity to speak to our 1,750 new Chevening Scholars yesterday at the exuberant event that is Chevening Orientation. This is what I said. What is Chevening? Chevening is a...
View ArticleMind your language
The Indigenous Peoples’ Memorial is one of the many striking buildings in the Brazilian capital designed by the prolific modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer. Built in a spiral-shaped design around a...
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