Richard D North.

The publication on 4 September 2024 of the final report into the catastrophic 2017 Grenfell Tower fire highlighted a wider range of issues than any single disaster report before it. It seemed to top-out twenty years' worth of corporate and institutional malfeasance which have brought the "crisis in trust" to the fore. From Enron (2001) to the decades of the Post Office scandal (which arguably added judicial failure to the mix), these debacles gave impetus to the pervasive modern sense that modern public bodies can't be relied on to be decent or frank. Read more...

In 2007 I wrote a book, Scrap the BBC!, saying that privatising the BBC was a cinch compared to fulfilling the far more important ambition of scrapping the big-state socialist NHS. A decade and a half on, I return in this rather long (<3,500 word) essay  to that tougher theme, and have ramped it up to encompass the even more important ambition to scrap the big state socialist welfare system altogether. That's the work of perhaps 30 years'-worth of Parliaments. It needs to be stated now as the long-term vision of any party which wants Britain to be post-socialist. Backing down from that challenge is an act of daily cowardice.
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This started as jottings about Glastonbury 2024, as seen on TV. It has morphed into a rather long account of all sorts of Glastonbury memories, and incorporating other festival moments, but ranging over the way the entire music scene has evolved in my time.

If some of the remarks seem judgmental, you might kindly put it down to the fact that I have been immersed in writing from the 19th and earlyish 20th Century when unfettered waspishlness was last in vogue. ¹ Read more...

Bernardine Bishop wrote two novels in her 20s, then became a psychotherapist until her 70s, when - forced by cancer - she abandoned her profession, and wrote three last novels. I look here at the first of her late books (published in 2013) and of her early books (published in 2013), both well received on their arrival. (Footnote ¹) Read more...

It has taken me many years to fret out what I mean by the question: What to do with words like 'spirituality' when applied in a material universe? Now that, at last, I think I have something like answers, the next question is: Can I usefully express myself on the matter? This post will be something of an evolving draft. Here goes.... Read more...

Excellent and, as usual, tantalising evidence of Stanley North's nature has quite suddenly been put my way. Tanya Harrod, the writer on the history and relationship of the worlds of art and of crafts, wrote asking me for some information about Stanley. Along the way Dr Harrod told me that Lucie Rie, the crucial modernist potter, had formed a strong relationship with Stanley, shortly after her arrival in London and late in his quite short life. Read more...

I want to show something of the workings of the soft-left, green, anti-Tory, 'progressive', Woke ideals which have coalesced to enfeeble so many of the brightest and best adults of our day. They have unconsciously but comprehensively embraced several linked varieties of liberalism (Kindergarten, Smug, Snobbish, and Bossy - even Totalitarian). They have abandoned a liberalism which is tough and self-challenging. I mourn how so many nice, intelligent people have allowed their minds and hearts to be hijacked to the point where they can't see the merit in the Rigorous Liberalism which could make them useful to our polity.

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Filson Young was often a passionate being, and quite often, it seemed, a bit buttoned up. He had two marriages and many affairs. He had a very wide acquaintance, literary, military and political. He grew a big reputation very young, not least because of his affiliation with the lively publisher, Grant Richards. Their team-work produced his first novel, Sands of Pleasure in 1905. It concerns a lighthouse and rural society in Cornwall and chandeleers and courtesans in Pairs. Read more...

This is an account of some parts of Shall I Listen? of 1933. It was the penultimate book by Filson Young (1876-1936). He was a BBC pioneer with instincts about the future of broadcasting which foreshadow the podcast age. He was a snob who disparaged Reithian London-centricity. He was a Londoner who invented a new style of outside broadcasting from a Cornish village. Read more...

In May 2022, the Lucy Worsley Investigates series had a film on the Black Death (repeated in February 2023, when I saw it). We were given the story of mid-14th Century Britain’s response to the dreadful plague. The BBC promotional blurb was full of how our heroine would investigate the… Read more...