http://www.barder.com Brian Barder's blog Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:25:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It's not very often that an outstandingly good and enjoyable movie gets so many lousy reviews, both public and private, and so many expressions of delight and admiration too. A friend of long standing and impeccable taste wrote in a recent e-mail, for example, about Australia: We saw ‘Australia’ in Athens ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/1417 Posted from IE Internet Explorer As I write (mid-November) the final results of the US presidential election are not in, but we know enough to highlight some figures.  With 66.7 million popular votes and counting, and with a lead of 6.5 percentage points over John McCain, Barack Obama won more popular ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/1413 My pre-new-year resolution for this diary entry is to resist the temptation to write about the credit crunch, global warming, the bankers, George Osborne, the Pope, the stock exchange, Governor Sarah Palin, the Daily Mail, the weather, Jonathan Ross, the flu epidemic or Osama bin Laden. Unfortunately I seem to ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/1400 The 6 March 2008 issue of the New York Review of Books includes a magnificent demolition job in a review of the memoirs of that rascal of the far right, John Bolton, by the veteran retired international public servant, Sir Brian Urquhart.  (Hat-tip: to Dr Lorna Lloyd at Keele, who ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/1377 A friend and former colleague has set me a challenge that (probably recklessly) I can't resist: I would be interested in your view of 2 recent events involving Gordon Brown. The first is his reported reluctance to agree to the Tories' request to be granted access to senior Whitehall officials as ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/1368 It looks as if YouTube and its owner, Google, may have come up with a revolutionary new idea that could save classical music from extinction in the digital internet age.  If you have ever been moved by a string quartet, an opera aria or a cello concerto, you should give ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/1345 A few weeks ago John Greenwell, Australian lawyer and friend of many years' standing, mentioned in an e-mail that his wife Jill, not long ago retired from teaching at Canberra's (perhaps Australia's) premier girls' school, was in Bhutan.  "What," I enquired in reply, "on earth is Jill doing in Bhutan?" A ... http://www.barder.com/whats-jill-doing-in-bhutan KPICASA_GALLERY(Jill in Bhutan) http://www.barder.com/photos/jill-in-bhutan A lively debate is in progress over on Owen's blog about leaks of sensitive government information and the best way to deal with them.  With apologies for my cowardly reluctance to butt in to the latest exchange between Owen and Paulie, I just want to make some points that are ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/1318 According to the BBC's latest report, The solicitor for the Home Office worker who leaked information [Christopher Galley] says he did it because it was material that was "important for the public to know". The problem is that Mr Galley's ministers took a different view of what material needed to be made ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/1308 A huge storm has blown up in the media and among MPs over the action of the police in arresting the Tory front-bench shadow immigration minister, Damian Green, holding him for nine hours (including two hours of questioning), searching with considerable rigour both his offices (including his office in the ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/1300 Today's (20 November 2008) Guardian publishes a letter from me about Lord Bingham's recent declaration that the attack on Iraq was illegal, and the counter-arguments by Lord Goldsmith, Attorney-General at the time, that it was not.  As the edited and published version (perhaps inevitably) omits some of its nuances, ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/1269 In case any reader of this hasn't already heard it, President-elect Obama's first weekly address, delivered on 15 November, can be seen and heard on YouTube at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd8f9Zqap6U . It lasts some three and a half minutes. It's also available on The Huffington Post (online newspaper) of 18 November at -- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/15/obama-urges-congress-to-m_n_144035.html The meatiest part ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/1252 The final results of the US presidential election are not yet in [16 November 2008], but we know enough to highlight some key figures. With 66.7 million popular votes and counting, and with a lead of 6.5 percentage points over John McCain, Barack Obama won more popular votes than ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/1249 Thanks to my trusty filial Webmeister-in-Chief, Website and Blog Manager, Ephems has had another major makeover. It's now even more closely integrated with its parent website and the very useful 'Search' facility at the top of each page has been restored to health, now for the first time searching the ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/1234 Last night was an exciting time to be in New York.  Our younger daughter, L, voted in the morning for the first time in an American national election since becoming an American citizen:  there were no queues outside the polling station, and inside we watched the orderly line of voters ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/844 An article in today's Washington Post quotes a distinguished American academic as saying that -- if ... the voters pull a Truman [i.e. if McCain-Palin confound the polls and the pundits by winning], that is going to be the end of whatever shred of credibility they have left. That's right.  If McCain ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/842 Senator McCain and the Republicans over the water, and the Tories over here, bear-led (the appropriate term in present circumstances) by Cameron, a rather battered Osborne, and Hague, are demanding cuts in government spending -- for example, the Tories' advocacy of a freeze on local council spending, and the GOP ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/841 One or two of Senator McCain's pronouncements on policy issues and other matters during the third and final debate raised some eyebrows. Healthcare:  McCain berates Obama for his proposed compulsory universal healthcare programme, preferring to give everyone a $5,000 tax credit and leaving it to individuals to spend it on ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/839 The 2008 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Martti Ahtisaari couldn't be more welcome or more spectacularly well earned.  I have been a respectful admirer since I was involved for a few years in the Namibia independence negotiations.  Ahtisaari, an experienced, calm, unpompous, shrewd, bulky Finn, was the United Nations ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/837 Two things in particular struck me as I watched all 90-odd minutes of the second US presidential debate between Senators McCain and Obama, held last night in Tennessee and available now on the Web (e.g.) here:  first, the ever-widening gulf between political perceptions in (most of) the US and in ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/835 We returned, J and I, on Sunday from another cruise, this time aboard the biggest and newest ship in the UK cruise fleet, P&O's Ventura.   Our private ship's log, or diary, of the two weeks afloat, is here.  You can see a selection of the photographs I took, as ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/832 WELCOME to Wandsworth, south-west London, and to Brian Barder’s website, a commentary on current political and social affairs, a blog (‘Ephems’), a chronicle of family history and contemporary family doings, and a few jottings on other miscellaneous matters. In ... http://www.barder.com Cruise Diary: P&O cruise ship Ventura, Mediterranean, September 2008 Sunday, 14 September: The drive from Wandsworth to Southampton is dogged by minor but irritating mishaps. Our short cut to Chalker's Corner for the M3 through Richmond Park is denied to us by some kind of running event in the park, ... http://www.barder.com/family/contemporary/ventura08 Et in Arcadia Ego Tuesday 4 September 2007 We're a few days into our cruise on P&O Arcadia so far (writing this in our cabin on Tuesday afternoon, 4 Sept). Food excellent, with an acceptable and varied wine list; a particularly good self-service restaurant as optional alternative to ... http://www.barder.com/family/contemporary/arcadia Ephems is going on holiday tomorrow, Sunday 14 September 2008, until the end of September.  So there'll be no new posts and no responses to new comments.  But keep them rolling in anyway! Back online in October to discover what happened at the Labour Party Conference, whether Gordon is still ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/830 I have spent the last few days with a couple of former colleagues trying to get together a group of former British diplomats willing to sign a joint letter to The Times in reply to one by Denis MacShane, MP, published on 3 September (a pregnant date).  There was a ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/829 With apologies for returning once again to this miserable topic (for earlier recent treatments see this, this and this, plus the comments appended to each),  I recommend an article in the Irish Independent of 31 August by Sir Ivor Roberts ("Payback time as Kosovo chickens come home to ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/828 "Richard T" has posted a fascinating comment on my "Kosovo-Georgia Connection" post of 21 August, speculating that the principal motive behind American wooing of Georgia and sponsorship of Georgia for NATO membership may be to secure bases from which US and perhaps Israeli aircraft could attack Iran without needing to ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/827 In writing about Kosovo and Georgia, I am handicapped by having no first-hand experience of the area, apart from having served in Moscow in the early 1970s, including a brief visit to Georgia during that time. So it's reassuring to find that someone with perhaps more extensive first-hand knowledge of ... http://www.barder.com/ephems/825