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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26th November 2013 Washington DC, USA
For me, the transatlantic relationship is personal. 16 years ago on Sunday, my family and I (and our dog Matty) emigrated from Huntingdon, near Cambridge, to Chico, California. Of course, there are more extreme contrasts than the UK and California, but as a twelve year-old, everything was so different. When we moved in November 1997, […]
25th November 2013 Chennai, India
It feels as if it’s been a month of anniversaries, some happy, some sad. On the positive side, we celebrated the Prince of Wales’ 65th birthday in Kerala – a date which, as he said, he proudly shares with Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru. On Friday, I was asked to open the 2013 Cultural Festival for the […]
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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 […]
9th October 2013 New Delhi, India
Yesterday the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Professor Peter Higgs from the University of Edinburgh and Professor François Englert from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. It was awarded for their work , in the 1960s, predicting the existence of the Higgs Boson. I’m not a physicist, so if you want to know […]
4th September 2013 Washington DC, USA
Have you ever been watching an award show or an interview and seen an actor or actress speak out of character and… hold on a moment… they’re British? This most recently happened to me while watching the Emmy’s last year when I (unfortunately) hadn’t yet watched ‘Homeland’ and didn’t realise that Damian Lewis, who won […]
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29th August 2013 USA
It is rare to witness the moment when an inventor sees his dreams realised; the culmination of years of testing, adapting and perfecting inventions suddenly paying off. I had the pleasure of witnessing one of those extraordinary moments while attending the 33rd National Veterans Wheelchair Games last month in Tampa, Florida. When I visited Tampa […]
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28th August 2013 USA
Today I will have the honour of representing the UK government on the fiftieth anniversary of Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s historic “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. I’ve represented my country at many big events in my 20-year diplomatic career, from G8 and UN Summits to the State of the Union […]
13th August 2013 Chicago, USA
The following is a guest post by Sophia Wootton, summer intern at the British Consulate General in Chicago. Sophia is a recent graduate of the University of Birmingham. In only my second week as an intern for the British Consulate General in Chicago, I have been lucky enough to meet British software engineer, Rob Bishop, […]
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18th July 2013
Some UK visitors to India, and British newspaper headlines, seem to consider that business here should be ours by “divine right”, as if it is Britain’s for the taking. We have, the argument goes, a special relationship with India – language, law, cricket, immigrants – which means that we must have an advantage on the commercial playing field. […]
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