Posted by RDN under Mind and body / Mr C's Makeover Politics / Politics and campaigns / Rightist manifestos on 27 November 2009. No comments.
It is just possible that Philip Blond and the Red Toryism of his ResPublica are the very fig-leaf a true-blue Conservative Party needs. It may be that David Cameron, beyond his bland rebranding of the Tories, is thinking along these lines…. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body / Politics and campaigns on 19 October 2009. No comments.
Oliver James has written some silly and poorly-argued books and it would have been nice if Contented Dementia, his new offering, was an exception. It isn’t. More »
Posted by RDN under At the movies / Mind and body / TV and Radio on 22 September 2009. No comments.
The late Dominick Dunne, novelist and chronicler of celebrity trials, was by parts Taki, Jennifer’s Diary, The Sunday Times Insight team, Edith Wharton, Thackeray, and J J Hunsecker (of The Sweet Smell of Success). More »
Posted by RDN under At the movies / Mind and body on 16 September 2009. No comments.
Previously, I listed Karen Blixen’s house outside Copenhagenand Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge as my favourite interiors. Casting around for third, I wondered about including Charleston, the rustic Bloomsbury hangout. Now I have a better candidate: Matisse’s chapel at Saint Paul de Vence. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body on 11 August 2009. No comments.
Betty Miller and Henry James both wrote beautifully about the merits of failure. Here are a couple of quotes from a mid-summer mini-orgy of reading. More »
Posted by RDN under Economic crisis / Mind and body on 1 August 2009. No comments.
Hot from ENRON, the dazzling show at Chichester Festival Theatre’s Minerva Theatre, one realises that it was a romp with next to nothing useful to say. I imagine it will go down a storm when it transfers to the Royal Court. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body / RDN's media cribsheets on 25 July 2009. No comments.
The BBC’s The Big Questions has asked me on to discuss consumerism. Presumably they want me to defend it and I’m pretty happy to do that. Of course, I intend to be a little mealy-mouthed. I am very happy to defend affluence and inequality. I think people do little harm and much good as consumers, but I suppose consumerism is one degree too materialist to be wholly satisfactory. More »
Posted by RDN under At the movies / Mind and body on 1 June 2009. No comments.
This is perhaps the most beautiful interior I have ever seen. It is at once bohemian and aristocratic. Karen Blixen being who she was, it is determinedly unbourgeois. It is of course also a wonderful pilgrimage site. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body on 23 March 2009. No comments.
I never met Sergeant Lee “Jonno” Johnson, Natasha Richardson or Jade Goody but I am proud of them. I suppose other countries can produce such “types”, and that if I were American or French I could point to similarly moving or touching personal stories. But still: Blimey! More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body on 12 March 2009. No comments.
The Myerson family saga is a perfect media event. I can think of no-one who is losing. Jake, especially, stands a good chance of benefiting. More »
