Max Atkinson's Blog

Last year, I marked Budget day by posting the remarkable sequence from the early section of Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream...

Readers from outside the UK have probably never heard of Tony Benn, and quite a few here will be too young to remember just how effective an...

This is the first in a series of posts to mark this month's 25th anniversary of a television documentary that completely changed my life...

I mentioned in an earlier post an observation, first reported in my book Our Masters’ Voices , about there being a standard or ‘normal’ b...

Of the all the tributes to Edward Kennedy I've heard over the past couple of days, the one that stood out for me came from Vice-presiden...

Speeches by all three of the Kennedy brothers are to be found in the top 100 American speeches listed on the website American Rhetoric . For...

About twelve years after the moon landing in 1969, I started writing about the power of rhetorical techniques like the contrast, and remembe...

It wasn't just some of David Dimbleby's questions that got applauded on last night's Question Time (see previous post). Some of ...

Having used the neat alliterative phrase ‘decade of debt’ early in his reply to Mr Darling’s Budget speech on Wednesday, David Cameron retur...

Last night I went to an enjoyable and nostalgic event hosted by Total Politics magazine, at which Paddy Ashdown was in conversation with Ia...

The oratory of Martin Luther King was clearly derived from the style of preaching he had grown up with in the Southern Baptist Church. That ...

As promised the other day, here are some notes on the rhetorical highlights of Daniel Hannan’s attack on Gordon Brown. At its simplest, the ...

When I first started doing research into political speeches in the early 1980s, I concentrated on sequences that prompted applause – as it s...

In Vince Cable’s speech at the spring conference of the Liberal Democrats in Harrogate a couple of days ago, there was a sequence that would...

A point I made a couple of days ago was that bursts of applause can be used to identify which points in a speech an audience liked best. If ...

When I first started studying bursts of applause in political speeches thirty years ago, some people couldn’t see the point; others thought ...

Unlike many commentators, I haven’t had much time to try my hand at second guessing what Barack Obama might say in his inaugural address tom...

With pageants like the annual trooping the colour and state opening of parliament by the Queen, occasional royal weddings, state funerals an...

The problem of pitch (see PART I) was only one aspect of public speaking that Mrs Thatcher took seriously after becoming leader of the Conse...

When I wrote 'Our Masters' Voices' (1984), Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and looked well set to win at least one more ter...