Thank you @kajakallas.bsky.social for mentioning my latest book Peacemaker in your ERR interview and discussing U Thant in your @economist.com guest essay this week. economist.com/the-world-ahea….

With many thanks to William Dalrymple @willdalrymple.bsky.social for choosing Peacemaker as a “Book of the Year”. www.spectator.com.au/2025/11/book...

Today in 1961: little-known Burmese diplomat U Thant (just 13 yrs from life as a small town schoolteacher) takes helm of UN at the height of the Cold War. Within a year he would mediate the Cuban Missile Crisis and go on to face more than a dozen wars. Full story in Peacemaker.

Very grateful to Pratap Mehta for this extremely insightful and compelling appraisal of my new book.

The next U.N. Secretary-General may prove indispensable in preventing another world war. It’s been done before - exactly this week in 1962. But that story - on the front pages everywhere at the time - was quietly dropped down the memory-hole www.ft.com/content/426f...

Delighted to discuss my new book Peacemaker and the future of the @UN with @amanpour edition.cnn.com/2025/10/10/tv/…

Can count on the @DailyMail for the most eye-catching headline of all my book reviews (so far….)

I'll be speaking about my new book at UNICEF @unicef.org on 17 September. Please register by Monday if you’d like to come.

Pleased to say that my new book will be published in Sept. Featuring the Congo & the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam & the Six Day War, it’s the story of how the newly independent nations of Africa & Asia transformed the UN and when, for a while, a global peace seemed within reach.

A photo - I think never before published - of my grandfather U Thant and Dwight Eisenhower minutes after hearing the news that JFK had been shot (they were having lunch together at the Waldorf)

56 years ago the astronauts of the Apollo 8 mission presented this photo - the first taken from the Moon - to my grandfather, sci-fi buff, space enthusiast, and UN Secretary-General U Thant, with the inscription “ “As others see us, clearly, one world.”

Today in 1971 - John Lennon and Yoko Ono arriving at my grandfather U Thant’s retirement party at the Pierre in NY. Lennon borrowed Pete Seeger’s guitar and sang Imagine for the first time in America.