Richard D North welcomes you to his blog. (It links to my old site, now archived.) I am a right-winger, in love with the free market and arguing against the soft-left, liberal, green, PC consensus. Oh, and I'm a conflicted softie. A bit hippy and arty round the edges too. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body / TV and Radio on 11 November 2011. No comments.
Mr Gervais’s new comedy is not very funny.
But it made me uncomfortable only because I am not sure it is proper to let Ricky Gervais pull my chain. More »
Posted by RDN under At the movies on 10 November 2011. No comments.
One doesn’t expect a disaster movie to be quiet and respectable – still less that it might be engaging all the while. I’m more used to cutting my losses: thrills and tension come at the expense of what Matt Damon calls a “paranoia aesthetic”, and there’s usually lashings of anti-corporate, pseudo-dissident claptrap too. More »
Posted by RDN under At the movies on 9 November 2011. No comments.
The new slick version of The Debt is a pretty good thriller but I couldn’t help feeling it was just the tiniest bit exploitative. It has some advantages over the original Israeli version (called Ha-hov and released in 2007). Its storyline is more richly complex. The acting is better and the scenes in which the Nazi doctor manipulates his captors are more taut. There are more thrills and spills. More »
Posted by RDN under Military Covenant / Mind and body / Politics and campaigns on 8 November 2011. No comments.
The British Computer Society asked me to be one of two responders at a debate dinner featuring Trevor Phillips of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (7 November 2011).
The question was: will it be possible for someone to be a full citizen without digital access? More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body on 6 November 2011. No comments.
Edward Burra is far more impressive in the flesh than in reproduction. Waldemar Januszczak got almost everything about him right, I think, in the Sunday Times, and I add only this … More »
Posted by RDN under Handling protest / Politics and campaigns on 1 November 2011. No comments.
Much of the encampment and debacle at St Paul’s is good and even hilarious news, but the best bit is that it has produced a nearly perfect confrontation… More »
Posted by RDN under At the theatre on 29 September 2011. No comments.
This was a superb The Browning Version with every nuance of the main characters richly and neatly done. Perhaps the headmaster was an ounce too bouncily nasty. Naturally enough. it’s the Hare homage, votive offering, re-calibration (or whatever) of Rattigan which had even more of one’s attention. Here’s a first bash at an appreciation…. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body on 19 September 2011. 2 comments.
I had four great days in and around the Hanseatic League city, Visby, and its island of Gotland. As the new Gudrun Sjödén catalogue says: the island is a symphony of greys. Visby, though, is vivid, and brilliantly coloured. It has plenty of Farrow and Ball chic, but also bags of winter-defying gaudiness. (All in the best possible taste, of course.) Here’s a brief guide… More »
Posted by RDN under Economic crisis / Mind and body / Politics and campaigns / RDN's media cribsheets on 26 August 2011. 2 comments.
I’ve been invited to the Greenbelt religious festival (27/08/11) to debate ” The Poor are Poor because the Rich are Rich?” It is arranged round a Methodist document, Of Equal Value: Poverty and Inequality in the United Kingdom. More »
Posted by RDN under At the movies on 12 August 2011. No comments.
Ewan McGregor shines in this movie. There’s not a hint of the Norman Wisdom which sometimes afflicts him in cheekier moments. But the charm is certainly there. He is much more credible as an existentially sad man than he was as a writer in Ghost. But this isn’t a sad film and it scrupulously avoids the feel-good too. It’s the kind of paint-dryer one may well watch again and again. More »
