Richard D North
writer
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RDN CV & contact

You can email RDN: rdnorth – at – richarddnorth.com

More on RDN and his background is available here in the pre-2008 archive site. (RDN is not Dr Richard A E North, who for several years has worked as author and journalist Richard North, often with Christopher Booker and on advocating Brexit.)

RDN’s grandfather was Stanley Kennedy North (1887-1942), the illustrator and paintings conservator (he hated “restorer”); his grandmother was the poet and painter, Vera Bax (born Vera Rawnsley, 1889-1974), whose second husband was Filson Young, and whose third husband was Clifford Bax (whose brother was Arnold Bax, whom she painted.) There is more on all these figures here.

Richard D North, born 1946, is a writer and poet and was (in the period 1973-circa 2015) a journalist, book author, broadcaster and commentator. He was until about 2016 active as the media fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs, the free market think tank, and was a fellow of the Social Affairs Unit, the home of conservative cultural thought.

RDN contributed for several years to the SAU’s online review on the arts, culture and politics. Some video of him appears on his page at Amazon; on YouTube and here, in a little film made for the BBC’s Sunday Morning Live in 2012, on greed and banking.

His most recent long-form work is the late-2012 eBook The Right-wing Guide to Nearly Everything.

RDN’s quite recent books include Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics: Why old Tory stories matter to us all (SAU, 2009); “Scrap the BBC!”: Ten years to set broadcasting free (SAU, 2007); Mr Blair’s Messiah Politics: Ten years of inspirational government, 1997-2007 (SAU, 2007); Rich Is Beautiful: A very personal defence of Mass Affluence (SAU, 2005).

In the mid-70s, RDN started to write on a wide range of subjects, including the arts, travel, the environment and conservation, and politics, for The Listener, The Observer, The Guardian, The Times. He wrote for every issue of the pioneering magazine, Vole, and edited its last few editions.

In the late 80’s RDN was the Independent‘s environment correspondent and  in the early 1990s the Sunday Times‘ environmental, conservation and Third World development columnist. His upbeat, rather anti-green, book Life On a Modern Planet: A manifesto for progress (Manchester University Press, 1995) marked 25 years’ obsession with the topics.

RDN has written books on Christian monasticism (Fools For God, Collins, 1987); British conservation (Wild Britain, Century, 1983); our duties to animals (The Animals Report, Penguin, 1983); the ecological and social impact of Western lifestyles (The Real Cost, Chatto & Windus, 1986); schooling, farming (with Charlie Pye-Smith); and Patrick Lichfield’s glamour photography.

RDN wrote extended essays on land-use planning, professions, drugs policy, the philosophy of liberty, the concept of sustainable development, stag hunting, farming and the state, and waste management policy. See them all here. Of all these strands of argument, he is proudest of his continuing work on the British Constitution and the governance of Britain.

RDN wrote pamphlets on risk, the hereditary status of the House of Lords, the fur trade, Genetically Modified plants, and the legal status of protest. See all of them here.

Until around 2017 he appeared quite often on The Big Questions, Sunday Morning Live and Broadcasting House. Until about 2011, he was frequently on Today, Newsnight, the Jeremy Vine Show, Channel 4 News, Sky TV, and the Moral Maze as a defender of capitalism, globalisation, representative democracy and any other topic where the soft left liberal green orthodoxy needed robust challenge.

He was an experienced (and if required, exuberant and even abrasive) public speaker.

You can email RDN at rdnorth – at – richarddnorth.com.