Richard D North welcomes you to his new 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 At the movies / Mind and body on 28 April 2010. No comments.
For long stretches of I Am Love, I was bowled over in much the way I imagine the movie-makers intended. It had risible patches which didn’t quite shake the wheels off the wagon. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body / TV and Radio on 16 April 2010. One comment.
There is an enormous amount to be said for Africa. Stoicism and good humour would be right up there as attributes which abound. Famously, Nigerians have all that in spades. Last night’s BBC film concentrated on a Lagos rubbish dump and its scavengers. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body on 4 April 2010. No comments.
Did you watch the Boat Race coverage? I was struck by the way Dan Snow (who rowed in several) went on and on about how winning it was lovely but losing it marked you for life. I forget the details, but it all left a powerful impression of a generation of athletes for whom winning is a graceless necessity whilst losing is a psychological catastrophe. This is bizarre and applies to other butch moderns. More »
Posted by RDN under At the movies on 4 April 2010. No comments.
This rather good-looking film was surprisingly tiresome, but I could not be quite sure why until I read some stuff about the last days of the Tolstoy marriage. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body on 14 March 2010. No comments.
The Observer ran a story about a pair of economists, Curtis Eaton and Mukesh Eswaran, who think they’ve proven that affluent societies are beset by a horrible envy, and I lobbed up on the BBC News Channel to opine. Here’s what I said and what I should have said. More »
Posted by RDN under Economic crisis / Mr C's Makeover Politics / Rightist manifestos on 9 March 2010. No comments.
I was bucked to have a piece run on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free (Cif). I was bemoaning Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics. Here are a few reflections on the comments it received. More »
Posted by RDN under At the movies / Military Covenant on 8 March 2010. No comments.
The courage of EOD – bomb disposal – staff is well worth celebrating and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker does it brilliantly. Still, this is perhaps not all that accurate an account of the trade. More »
Posted by RDN under At the movies on 7 March 2010. No comments.
Everything about the buzz surrounding Tom Ford’s film led one to expect the worst. To overstate the case, one expected a sort of style fascism. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body / TV and Radio on 2 March 2010. No comments.
Searle is 90 tomorrow and Channel 4 News ran a tribute interview. Typically, the commentary had to have a little attitudinising. More »
Posted by RDN under Military Covenant / Politics and campaigns on 2 March 2010. No comments.
The British military tradition is real, but it is up for grabs. Here is my account of a British military which becomes large, clever, multi-purpose, and is deployed worldwide. Along the way, it becomes more commercial, more part-time and more argumentative. More »
