Richard D North.

We paid £50-odd for our two tickets, and added to it nearly £9 to buy the script by Howard Brenton. We left at half-time, and would willingly have paid a little more than£25 to be out of the place. The £9 was so I could reassure myself that there wasn't some second act bombshell which made this dire piece worth watching. Read more...

I was asked to appear on Radio 4's special programme BP: Beyond the horizon and the Macondo disaster. Would it transform the firm and the oil business? I'm clinging to the idea that it won't much, but with one big caveat. Here's the crib I prepared.... Read more...

This stunning movie is a blend of Conrad's The Heart of Darkness (or Apocalypse Now) and Karen Blixen's Out Of Africa (book and movie). Swirl in some Lord Of the Flies and you've sort of got the picture. Goodness knows why the right-ons love it. Read more...

These books certainly fit my prejudices, but also tally with my 4o years of following the news in a middlebrow sort of way. If they're wrong in any particular, or their general conclusions, it'd be fascinating to see the evidence. Read more...

Forty years on and Erich Segal's "Love Story" makes a surprisingly spikey and yet delicious show in Chichester Festival Theatre's Minerva Theatre. Read more...

It's not often a good ploy to whinge, and this isn't exactly a moan. Well, only a bit of one. I want to stand up for my Life On a Modern Planet (1995) and Rich Is Beautiful (2005) as works of "rational optimism". Read more...

It's been a spectacularly bad few days for BP. Things looks set to get a bit worse. But they may yet turn out less than apocalyptic. Without shouting the odds, here're some thoughts. Read more...

We are at the beginning of the end of the phoney war on the BP oil spill. We seem to be in sight of beginning the real shooting. Here's why... Read more...

Obviously we all need to cross our fingers for BP. The oil giant needs the same luck as the seashores its oil may yet severely damage. This may, after all, be the worst such accident we have yet seen, as I said on the BBC's Today programme. I hope I wasn't premature in a later FT letter in suggesting that the oil giant, and its industry, will flourish however awful the outcome of this accident, and deserves to. Read more...

Just before I get too sunny, here are three areas where the country's politicians, and the Tories not least, face real problems. They all centre on the country's habit of self-deception. Read more...