Richard D North.

The income and wealth inequality gap between the top 1 per cent and the remaining 99 per cent has featured a good deal recently. It's getting wider. But it matters very little. What matters is an emerging cultural gap. Read more...

Watch out: this film is brilliant but you may pass on it on the basis that it is "charming", "deeply humane", "a glorious hymn to the struggles of the working man" and so on, as it is routinely blurbed by admirers. Le Havre is rather better than its fans and possibly even its creators wanted. Read more...

Tim Montgomerie of Conservative Home was on the Andrew Marr Show sofa and joined James Landale in doing the now obligatory obeisance to Margaret Hodge for her "brave" work as chairman of the House of Common's Public Accounts Committee. This is all nonsense. Read more...

This book bears a superficial resemblance to the rest of the angst literature on Anglosphere inequality, but it is much better than The New Few or The Spirit Level. Its use of evidence about the separations between top and bottom in US society seems fairer and brighter. Yet more to the point, though flawed where it most matters (in its proposed solutions), Charles Murray's cultural and social arguments seem far more interesting than most. Read more...

Jack Straw's autobiography, Last Man Standing, has been well-recieved, and justly so. At the risk of being patronising or condescending, it's worth saying that it is a touching book. I fancied myself admiring its author. I had to remind myself that it might be - perhaps had to be, was perhaps inevitably - a touch self-serving. Here's a little unpicking of all that.... Read more...

Monty Don is an extraordinary figure, and never more so than in his new series on French gardens. At home, and normally, his approach on Gardeners' World is a work of art. It draws one in. His persona is the antithesis of the TV celebrity. There is no concession to the plebian or the demotic. He is quite Bloomsbury, or Sitwell. He is of the 1950s - somehow, in his world, we are only just out of rationing. Electricity has been invented, but is kept indoors - it has not reached the garden, quite.  His is the manner of an eccentric aristocrat, or gnarled bohemian. But there is the affectation of peasant authenticity, and quite possibly a dread of the common, the flashy, the arriviste and the nouveau. That produced a fine muddle in France. Read more...

In 2009, I reviewed the then-new book, The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in the Social Affairs Unit website. I thought the highly-influential and much-quoted work very flawed on just about every level. Until very recently, I hadn't noticed that intelligent, informed voices had continued to attack the book's handling of the inquality data. So I thought I'd now provide some sources which may prove useful.... Read more...

[I wrote this update in 2013 and have revisited for a very light tickle in April, 2017.] Rather gallingly, my sceptical review of Oliver James's 2009 book, Contented Dementia, produces far more comment than most of my posts do. I more or less stick by it, though I wish I had found a way of noting my criticisms in a way which didn't seem such a red rag to fans of the care methods it promotes. Looking at the brouhaha now, there are some interesting things to note.... Read more...

The modern hospitality industry is fascinating. Naturally, it is plagued by the post-modern: Tesco's sort of went under cover to launch their Harris + Hoole chain of designedly uncorporate coffee shops, and they are probably quite nice. But they are unlikely to thrill the way Hemingways of Haslemere does. Read more...

I had highish hopes of Ferdinand Mount's book, The New Few. Here, after all, was a famously intelligent, civilised and well-informed conservative voice addressing a concern which is widespread: that Britain is badly run, and controlled by rather few people. Actually, the book made one wonder in what sense Mr Mount still feels he is of the right (if he does), not least since almost everything he says is commonly, and rather boringly, said by the left. The following looks at the book in some detail.... Read more...