[GTranslate]Pungent, ironic, apparently bizarre. And above all, documented. These are the “diplomatic notes” by James Hansen (in the pic), the articles of real geopolitics that have been published for years in a very popular newsletter and in the print and web editions of the Corriere Canadese.

A real “world” of curiosity and information, often unpublished, on the most varied topics: from politics to art, from economics to culture. From the past and the present and from every corner of the planet, as if they were “diplomatic dispatches that seem to be sent from the Earth to an alien intelligence curious to understand our world”, as we read in the presentation of the book that finally collects these little “pearls” , the result of passionate and meticulous research.

The volume (in the pic, the cover), published by “Biblion”, is naturally entitled “Nota Diplomatica” (“Diplomatic Note”, subtitle: “Unnatural practices”), collects the weekly issues of the last three years and it’s introduced by a preface by the ambassador, journalist and writer Sergio Romano. Not a casual choice, given that Hansen himself has a diplomatic career behind him and is a journalist.

An American from Seattle, Hansen moved to Italy in the 1970s as an employee of the US diplomatic corps. Having settled in Italy, he was correspondent for international newspapers, director of the geopolitical magazine “East” and head of the press office of Olivetti, Fininvest and Telecom Italia. Today he is a consultant for international relations for large Italian companies and is, in fact, the author of the weekly “Nota Diplomatica”.

The book promises to be a “kaleidoscope of information”, “often – we always read in the presentation – surprising, always curious, stimulating, rigorously true and scrupulously documented”. Did you know, for example, that there was a musical instrument called “Cochleato Tube”? Or that Ford built a car, the ‘Nucleon’, which was powered by a nuclear reactor? Many ‘goodies’ like these, combined with witty geopolitical analyzes, are now collected in Hansen’s volume, available online at Biblion, on Amazon and on the main publishing sites – IBS, Feltrinelli online, Mondadori online, Libreria Universitaria  – or it can be booked at any bookshop.