Richard D North.

The new slick version of The Debt is a pretty good thriller but I couldn't help feeling it was just the tiniest bit exploitative. It has some advantages over the original Israeli version (called Ha-hov and released in 2007). Its storyline is more richly complex. The acting is better and the scenes in which the Nazi doctor manipulates his captors are more taut. There are more thrills and spills. Read more...

The British Computer Society asked me to be one of two responders at a debate dinner featuring Trevor Phillips of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (7 November 2011). The question was: will it be possible for someone to be a full citizen without digital access? Read more...

Edward Burra is far more impressive in the flesh than in reproduction. Waldemar Januszczak got almost everything about him right, I think, in the Sunday Times, and I add only this ... Read more...

Much of the encampment and debacle at St Paul's is good and even hilarious news, but the best bit is that it has produced a nearly perfect confrontation... Read more...

This was a superb The Browning Version with every nuance of the main characters richly and neatly done. Perhaps the headmaster was an ounce too bouncily nasty. Naturally enough. it's the Hare homage, votive offering, re-calibration (or whatever) of Rattigan which had even more of one's attention. Here's a first bash at an appreciation.... Read more...

I had four great days in and around the Hanseatic League city, Visby, and its island of Gotland. As the new Gudrun Sjödén catalogue says: the island is a symphony of greys. Visby, though, is vivid, and brilliantly coloured. It has plenty of Farrow and Ball chic, but also bags of winter-defying gaudiness. (All in the best possible taste, of course.) Here's a brief guide... Read more...

I've been invited to the Greenbelt religious festival (27/08/11) to debate " The Poor are Poor because the Rich are Rich?" It is arranged round a Methodist document, Of Equal Value: Poverty and Inequality in the United Kingdom. Read more...

Ewan McGregor shines in this movie. There's not a hint of the Norman Wisdom which sometimes afflicts him in cheekier moments. But the charm is certainly there. He is much more credible as an existentially sad man than he was as a writer in Ghost. But this isn't a sad film and it scrupulously avoids the feel-good too. It's the kind of paint-dryer one may well watch again and again. Read more...

Here's a stab at an explanation for these nice, middle class rioters and looters. It's clear that they are not immoral or wicked, or even all that badly brought up. Read more...

Today's rioters have parents who failed them. So it's worth looking at what was happening to inner city black and white 10 year olds, in the early and mid 1980s. They were the first fruit of a primary school system which decided to abandon the idea of traditional education. You may say that this did not matter much, since they were about to go into a secondary system which was hardly better. But the rot was in. Read more...