A stimulating little essay. Money quote:
Christie’s ouevre up until, say, ‘Cat Amongst the Pigeons’ in the late 1950s is an intriguing – if conventional – study in Burkean philosophy. What makes her more than that – what pushes her work into a higher realm – is that she was a clever enough woman to realise that the Burkean order she loved was becoming less and less tenable as social change accelerated. Often, the novels she wrote as an old woman from the 1960s until her death in 1974 are dismissed as inferior to the more famous early works, and it is undoubtedly the case that the plots are less sharp and imaginative. But I have always believed that they are the most intriguing: they chart the nervous breakdown of Burke’s England, and the intellectual bankruptcy of a conservatism derived from Disraeli and Baldwin, better than any other writer I know.
More sanity from Johann Hari.
THE MEDIA VERSUS THE WAR: Bret Stephens goes for the jugular about the domestic enemies of success in Iraq.
BORN GAY? More evidence for something I have long suspected.
FINALLY, SEXUAL PARITY: Why did it take so long for this to be developed?
The Dish 