But it originally wanted to keep the details for half a century. But this information could easily be used for much else besides thwarting terrorism. And the European Parliament deserves credit for standing up to it. The American justification for demanding such extensive information has never been convincing We are told it is an anti-terrorism measure. The US has also warned of delays for air passengers from Europe on arrival in America if the information is not forthcoming. Such bullying is disappointing coming from a respected trading partner.

The pressure from Washington throughout this affair has been intense. European airlines have been threatened with $6,000 fines for every passenger and a loss of landing rights if they fail to comply with this data transfer requirement. For this ruling, we also owe a particular debt of gratitude to the European Parliament, which has led the opposition to this pernicious deal and which referred the agreement to the Luxembourg court in the first place. The European Court of Justice struck down an agreement by the European Union yesterday to transfer extensive information on European airline passengers to the US authorities. Eurosceptics are fond of complaining about the interference of “Brussels” in our private lives. We trust they will therefore be eager to welcome the fact that an EU institution has acted to safeguard our privacy. But as the Edinburgh Festival prepares to celebrate its 60th birthday this summer, there are rumblings of doubt, too.

A report commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council suggests that Edinburgh’s position as the world’s foremost arts festival is under serious threat.. Edinburgh can take pride in the fact that its pioneering idea, dreamt up in the depths of post-war austerity, of holding a city-wide festival of arts and culture has been replicated all around the globe. After the Dragon he went to Rugby and to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied Greats. Following two years’ National Service with the Army in Germany in 1950-52, he joined the Foreign Service (as it then was), with his first overseas posting, to Vienna, in 1954.His death follows a long illness, which he bore with great courage, nursed with heroic devotion by his wife Margaret; they celebrated their golden wedding in 2004.Oliver Miles. Life was not easy, of course, and his father also wrote that Julian’s mother helped to feed the children by keeping ducks, which she fed by bringing home on her bicycle pails of swill from the nearby Dragon School.Julian Bullard, asked later in life why he chose to follow his father into the diplomatic service, said that it was because he remembered his father’s letters arriving home with the most wonderful postage stamps.

Smith, Master of Balliol College, Oxford.When Julian’s father was posted to Moscow in the 1930s no schooling was available, and his mother remained with the children in Oxford – which as his father recorded in his memoirs, The Camels Must Go (1961), proved a wise choice, as Oxford did not suffer in the Blitz. His father, Sir Reader Bullard, was the son of a tally clerk in London docks and had come through the grammar school and county scholarship route which was then open to children of exceptional ability, to enter the Levant Consular Service and end his career as ambassador to Persia Julian’s maternal grandfather was the historian A.L. His last post in the service was as ambassador to Bonn, 1984-88, then one of the most important jobs in the service, though his retirement at 60 came just before the old pattern of Cold-War Europe was finally broken.After retirement in 1988 he was active in the formation at Birmingham University of the Institute for European Law and the Institute for German Studies, and he was the university’s Chairman of Council and Pro-Chancellor from 1989 to 1994.In 2004 he was one of the 52 retired ambassadors who wrote to the Prime Minister questioning British policy in Palestine and Iraq.Julian Bullard was born in 1928 in Greece. He knew Arabic and the Arab world, and he also knew Europe and several of its languages, particularly the Europe of East and West including Russia and Germany. He is credited with devising the formula by which the decision was presented to Moscow, which successfully avoided the expected Russian retaliation, let alone a damaging breach.Like many British diplomats, Bullard had two diplomatic strings to his bow.

It was worth the effort.Bullard had shown in 1971 that he could also be wily and tough, when he was head of the East European and Soviet Union Department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office at the time of the sensational decision to expel 105 Soviet diplomat spies from London. It turned out to be because he wanted to show me the staircase, which was designed by Michelangelo. Since that conversation, I have observed that life contains many cheap screwdrivers.Before one meeting in Rome, he insisted that I should come to the meeting place half an hour early. Very often it will do the job perfectly well, but if you try to shift a really difficult screw, you end up damaging both screw and screwdriver.