Richard D North.

The latest climate change row concerns a book by the "denier", Ian Plimer (an Australian geologist) and its most public critic, climate "alarmist", George Monbiot (of the Guardian). George seems to be winning hands-down at the moment. It happens that another Australian, Garth Paltridge, has also produced a climate change book, and it is sceptical rather than refusenik. I hope my review of the books, below, shows how they are both bad. Read more...

Sending Mr al-Megrahi home to Libya has produced one of the most interesting muddles and mysteries of our time. I don't think we can trust anyone in authority to tell us what they really think. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Read more...

I'm due on the BBC's The Big Questions show in the morning. One of the subjects is protest and in particular the Climate Camp. If you save the planet, can you break the law? Read more...

Betty Miller and Henry James both wrote beautifully about the merits of failure. Here are a couple of quotes from a mid-summer mini-orgy of reading. Read more...

Hot from ENRON, the dazzling show at Chichester Festival Theatre's Minerva Theatre, one realises that it was a romp with next to nothing useful to say. I imagine it will go down a storm when it transfers to the Royal Court. Read more...

The BBC's The Big Questions has asked me on to discuss consumerism. Presumably they want me to defend it and I'm pretty happy to do that. Of course, I intend to be a little mealy-mouthed. I am very happy to defend affluence and inequality. I think people do little harm and much good as consumers, but I suppose consumerism is one degree too materialist to be wholly satisfactory.  Read more...

I told Radio 5's breakfast show that Lord Carter's proposal of a shift of a small, marginal BBC budget toward the ITV regional news operation at least had the merit of breaking the principle of BBC monopoly on state funding. Otherwise, it's not all that clever. Locals should pay for local journalism, and probably use cheaper dissemination than TV. Read more...

The current storm about MPs and their allowances, and the cry for Parliamentary reform, contain big dollops of humbug. Since we Brits are quite well-governed, this matters, a bit. Read more...

This is perhaps the most beautiful interior I have ever seen. It is at once bohemian and aristocratic. Karen Blixen being who she was, it is determinedly unbourgeois. It is of course also a wonderful pilgrimage site. Read more...

Mike Poulton's latest excursion into adapting Friedrich Schiller provides my first into seeing any of the great German's work. It was a lot more swashbuckling (schlossbuckling, one might say) than I expected. Read more...