29th April 2019
Geneva, Switzerland
The third session of the Preparatory Committee for the 2020 Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons opens today at UN Headquarters in New York. (Otherwise known as the NPT RevCon PrepCom; while we work tirelessly against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, we’re quite happy to proliferate jargon.) Over the next […]
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11th December 2013
New York, USA
Sometimes it takes seeing your own national customs through the eyes of another to recognise their strangeness. I was honoured to join Mayor Michael A. Nutter of Philadelphia on his trade delegation to London at the start of November, and one night, as we were having dinner at a riverside restaurant, there was a brilliant […]
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31st October 2013
New York, USA
New Yorkers have long cultivated a reputation for being nonplussed. We may well see a fistfight on the subway, an inflatable rat in front of a construction site, and an A-list movie star in fewer than five blocks– but we’re not going to let on that we did. Because in a city of 8 million […]
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3rd September 2013
Washington DC, USA
Today is my first day as Britain’s Deputy Ambassador to the United States. It’s a real privilege to be starting my new role. Partly that’s because it’s simply a terrific job. I’m in charge of making sure that the Embassy and the UK’s ten other posts in the US work together smoothly, which will be […]
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26th July 2013
New York, USA
Exactly a year ago tomorrow, I sat down with my twelve-year-old son in the Olympic Stadium to watch the Opening Ceremony. Extra tickets had become available about a month or so beforehand – they weren’t cheap, but as a Londoner the chance to be there was too good to miss. We’d got there early, long […]
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24th June 2013
New York, USA
I was at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, better known as MoMA, immersed in a discussion with a dozen others about what the Ghanaian artist’s piece titled “Bleeding Takari II” was made from and what it was meant to represent. I felt like I had an upper hand on the rest of the group […]
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22nd March 2013
Washington DC, USA
In land far, far away, a community of people sent an emphatic message to the rest of the world, definitively declaring their political status for the first time in history. “YES!” screamed from social media feeds on Monday 11 March, where the Falkland Islands announced their wish to retain their status as a British Overseas […]
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8th February 2013
New York, USA
My first Super Bowl experience was transcribing the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s half-time show in 2009 for Sky Sports’ subtitled output back in the UK. This, fortunately, required zero knowledge of how (American) football works – and played to my eternal love of The Boss. Since I moved to the […]
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5th February 2013
Washington DC, USA
The following is a guest blog by Lance Corporal Rob Howe from the Band of the Scots Guard. Lance Corporal Howe is currently taking part in the Pipes and Drums of The Black Watch and the Military Band of the Scots Guards 2013 US tour. One of the many wonderful aspects of life in The […]
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29th November 2012
New York, USA
Moustaches have been a staple of British male identity for centuries. They can be comic (Basil Fawlty, Borat), serious (any of Daniel Day-Lewis’s efforts), musical (Freddie Mercury leaps enthusiastically to mind), even political (one thinks of Harold Macmillan’s full-bodied triumph). Handlebar, pencil, horseshoe, toothbrush… such variety of facial topiary means there’s something for everyone. Approval […]
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