Richard D North.

Should a Brit access a holiday on the French Riviera by ferry-drive or fly-drive? One has to decide whether to turn the time and expense of making the driving option into a tourism experience versus making a driving dash for it versus the dubious pleasure of flying and – quite separately to be computed – the pleasure of car rental. Follows, my attempt to chart some of the options, after a recent trip south. Sorry – it’s a combination of fact and anecdote… Read more...

I have been wondering what I would say if asked to contribute to the Radio 2 Jeremy Vine Show mini-series on what it is to be human. I suppose I would begin by assuming that one is trying to see the difference between humans and animals. One angle, then, would be to say that we are moral: a large can of worms, that. But what else? Read more...

On 11 May 2010, the FT printed a letter of mine (reprinted below) on the 20 April 2010 BP Gulf of Mexico spill. Arguably, it was far too early for intelligent opinion to have formed. But - contrariwise - I precisely wanted to suggest that it was too early to come to judgement: that historically oil spills had seldom turned out as journalism had predicted in the excitement immediately following the event. But was I right? Read more...

Mine is hardly a timely intervention (as we call contributions to debate now), but I thought I'd post here a letter offered by me to the FT for publication but not used by them. It follows a piece by Simon Schama in the FT (5/6 October 2013) strongly deprecating the Daily Mail's accusation that Ralph Miliband wasn't a patriot. By the way, though in all sorts of ways I am a cosmopolitan liberal, I am strongly in support of the sort of line taken by the Mail's Paul Dacre in his Guardian piece on how his paper stands for the suburbanite mind. I agree that this mindset is the backbone of Britain, and I share many of its prejudices. Read more...

I was oddly touched by Tomorrow.  Its conceit was believable in both character and staging, and precisely because they are preposterous. Its central figure Norman Swann, was posited as probably queer and possibly a non-practising pederast; as glamorous, sad, modernist and - yes - socialist. Read more...

Nina Conti is on the road this autumn and the sell-out show is really marvellous. It is clever, sharp and charming - rather as the on-stage presence of its star. Read more...

I wrote this poem as a first attempt at doing justice to the pleasure I get in almost any site to do with the waste industry but perhaps especially recycling facilities. Read more...

It's not important why I lost touch with Bernardine Bishop and my friend, later her husband, Dr Bill Chambers. I feel a fool for letting it happen and it's a lack made even more sharp by her death. Her novels and other writing will last, and their publication make an extraordinary story, both literary and personal. I wrote this for me, of course, but also for Matt, her elder son, because he very kindly included me in her funeral, an event which was exhilarating as well as tearful. Read more...

This is the first poem I posted on my website. Something like it had been in my mind from visits to Crete and Pembrokeshire, but it was really prompted by my daughter Emma. She was celebrating Peter Renwick's birthday today and wanted a poem for the occasion. She and I had been visiting the Rex Whistler works in a temporary show at Salisbury Museum and his room at Mottisfont Abbey. Afterwards, we went for a walk on Stockbridge Down, our first there. Read more...