Richard D North.

This is a seriously touching film: there is plenty of understated acting talent on show; the characters are nuanced; the pacing's right; there is a proper suspense about the events we see. But.... Read more...

If you enjoy nice Denmark, you'll probably like this movie. Oddly, if you like Scan-noir, you may also find it fascinating and enjoyable.  After all, one arrives ready for a frock-romp and it turns into something gorgeous but quite bleak. It is another brick in the wall of our outsiders' understanding of child-friendly Denmark.... Read more...

SML had me make a little movie on the value of greedy and especially greedy bankers (my script is below) and then debate the issue with Diane Abbott and Rosie Millard. Luckily, Ruth Porter of my beloved IEA and Jamie Whyte, the free market philosopher, Skyped in to say some of the things which I ought to have done. Here's what I wanted to say and nearly did (these things never go quite to plan)... Read more...

This is quite the show Billington, Purves, Letts and several others have noted. I only note that the musicals (both the Cole Porter show and the cod Broadway show he invents and parodies) are all the more beautiful because they take us closer to the sexual politics which Shakespeare's Shrew look at. Read more...

I have been nurturing an odd impression that I might really like comics, but it's not one I am giving in to. That is: I haven't gone out and bought any Incredible Hulk or V for Vendetta comics. I haven't even investigated print copies of Maus.  But I do know the force of the genre: as a nine year-old I ran a prep school dorm's library of 64-page war comics, and I get little hits of those pleasures now. This movie gave me a huge blast. Read more...

Egged on by The Times's item on Flickr, "At Home With the Queen", I have posted this little snap of me and the 1977 Silver Jubilee poster which I made with the artist and printer Ann Brunskill. Details from the poster are here. Read more...

I want to have and give some explanation for why I was pleased when Coulson/Brooks did well at the Leveson inquiry and why - this is even trickier - I was not sorry to see Robert Jay bested.... Read more...

What a wonderful crop of young women we have in our crime thrillers just now. They are all obsessive, let's say. Their work-life balance isn't what it might be. Some stray into the autism spectrum and some claim great chunks of it. I make ten, and counting.... Read more...

The great thing is to go forth and get hold of the books of this very great middle to low brow writer of adventure romances, and read them. If this piece delays you in doing so, then ignore it. If it is what may push you into the Shute fan club, then please read on... Read more...

I would love to pose the question: Is Rosamond Lehmann the best of the mid-20th Century female novelists? I am nowhere near well-enough-read to opine very certainly. I am thinking of the world before Iris Murdoch (my mother's favourite during the 1950s and 1960s) and Muriel Spark (whose books I loved in the 1970s). Lehmann's core competition comes from Stella Gibbons, Betty Miller, Jean Rhys,  Rose Macaulay, Elizabeth Bowen. Viriginia Wolf ought to be in there, but perhaps the point is that Lehmann and the others are middlebrow and Woolf's highbrow competition doesn't count. Read more...