Paul Brummell

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 central courtyard it was apparently inspired by a Yanomami house. In truth, the building is looking a little the worse for wear. The permanent collection […]

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 place. It is a large rural mansion house in the English county of Kent, to the south-east of London, built […]

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 son, George, in the company of his parents and great aunt and uncle. The show was put […]

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 features, including modernist toilet blocks decorated with ceramic tiles from Brazilian master Athos Bulcao. I was intrigued to see that, […]

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 houses of parliament, continues the Gothic theme along its eastern side. There is another point of commonality which unites the neighbours around the square: public service. To […]

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 career ended as Ambassador to Laos in the early 1970s. It was while on a posting to Tunisia that Davidson, frustrated at […]

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 queue to buy a ticket earns you a place in another queue to enter the museum. But it […]

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 have soon come to realise that I was not alone in that. I have always been very British […]

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 to retrace an English journey which took place more than fifty years ago. The Beatles, the most famous band in the […]

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 scheme to engage students in the public debate on UK foreign policy, including through encouraging them to produce short articles for online […]