Hello, I'm Kate.

British, Amsterdam-based, and professionally difficult to summarise, which I've made peace with. I work in foreign affairs which is a rather conflict-ridden field full of fascinating and vastly varied people, places and problems to solve. Before that I read international law and PPE. Before that, I was the little girl who never stopped asking why. My days have since run from Westminster briefing rooms to conflict monitoring in Lebanon, and through that I've learnt that striving for peace means, unavoidably, proximity to its opposite.

Now, that is the serious spine of what I do, and I won't say too much more about it.

I've never believed that the analytical and the human belong in separate rooms. I think in stories and frameworks, argue for a living and for pleasure, and hold that the most interesting thing about any situation is usually the detail that actually explains it, the reason a place, a border or a people ended up the way they did.

This page is where that curiosity gets to roam. I love to write and make geopolitical video essays, chasing the real story underneath the macro headlines you might read in the Financial Times: the history, the accident, the decision made decades ago that quietly explains the present. I'm endlessly curious about the world we've built and how it came to be, and I try to take something dense and consequential and hand it over in a way that's honest, clear and often beautiful, without pretending it's simple.

My philosophy, such as it is, is unfashionably total: that the heart, the mind and the body are meant to be explored in concert, and that anything learned only from the neck up is rarely worth knowing. So I travel, often, and gladly on a whim, chasing the argument and the adventure in equal measure. I like spontaneity with good taste: the last-minute departure, the wrong turn that becomes the best day, and a chic, exacting eye for quality, detail and the authentic version of a place rather than its brochure. I care about how things are made and how they make you feel. I'd rather be multidimensional than legible, and I've stopped apologising for wanting a life that is rigorous and soft, ambitious and unhurried, all at once.

This is where those threads meet, and where I have no intention of choosing between them.