Richard D North.

This is a powerful move: involving, intelligent, scary. A bit of a paint-dryer, and no harm in that. Not quite a tear-jerker, which is good. But why did the man in the urinals say it was sentimental? Read more...

There was a fascinating RightMinds piece by Melanie Phillips on the row generated by the lefties Deborah Orr and Mehdi Hasan as they argued that being "pro-life" is not necessarily to be right-wing. I am not a fan of Ms Phillips' argument. Read more...

Here are five cribsheets I have prepared for a New Culture Forum launch/outing (London, 24 October 2012) for The Right-wing Guide to Nearly Everything. They download as PDFs. Read more...

During an outing on the Daily Politics Andrew (BBC TV, 20 September 2012) Neil asked me about right-wing heroes. I think we agreed that they were thin on the ground. I mentioned Keith Richards on account of his "the buck stops here" attitude to drug abuse. (And forgetting his claim to anti-Establishment dissidence, cited in Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind.) I collected myself sufficiently to add Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph. Below, are some more. Read more...

David Priestland had a fascinating but flawed take on Tom Stoppard's take on FMF's take on the Tory type (The Gentle Tory is alive and well – on television). Actually, I say, the BBC drama is unsurprisingly BBC-ish, but with valuable quirks. Its adaptor may be rightish, but the BBC's leftishness can live with this show pretty well.  Read more...

This week, Kindle/Amazon have published my Right-wing Guide to Nearly Everything, with a great free interactive sample. It’s on Facebook and Twitter, @RWG2NE. By all means use any of them to learn more or give the work a shove.

RWG2NE has gone out to most of… Read more...

Andrew Brown wrote a characterisically clever and challenging piece in his Guardian Cif Belief blog: Bob Marley, miracles and monsters on my path to atheism. I commented as follows: Read more...

Britiain's economic success clearly matters just now and it's germane to wonder if the Olympics have helped. Here are some pros and cons on the matter. Read more...

Ahead of George Osborne's opposing or accepting (there are mixed signals as to his intentions at this moment) the European Parliament's desire to curb the relationship between pay and bonuses for bankers, I was asked to discuss the idea with Ann Pettifor. (I was batting for the Institute of Economic Affairs and she for the New Economics Forum, so it was a nearly perfect face-off.) I breezily said that it didn't matter whether bankers earned their money as wages or bonuses. After all, what matters is what signals their contracts send them (go for quick returns or build the long-term health of their banks are obvious alternative possibilities). Read more...