I didn’t know Stanley Crossick well, but like a lot of us in the Brussels beltway I was very sad to hear of his death at the age of 75 at the weekend. When I first moved here in 1999 he was particularly visible as the founder of the European Policy Centre, which has published a decent tribute to him today. But what particularly impressed over the last few years was his adoption of new media: this septuagenarian grandee of the Brussels policy community took to the internet like a duck to water, despite his increasing physical infirmity. It is nice that he managed to pass the milestone of his 500th blog entry before he was called to a different level of communication. He will be missed.
It wasn’t normal brutal training exercises AFAIR, but full-blown experimentation to see how much it would take to break someone.