generalisations about conventional plot structures prescriptively: "He sets up criteria for art, and ends up condemning Rigoletto, The Cherry Orchard, Wagner, Proust, Joyce, Kafka and Lawrence – the list goes on – while praising Crocodile Dundee, ET and Terminator 2". Fay Weldon wrote "This is the most extraordinary, exhilarating book. It always seemed to me that 'the story' was God's way of giving meaning to crude creation. Booker now interprets the mind of God, and analyses not just the novel – which will never to me be quite the same again – but puts the narrative of contemporary human affairs into a new perspective. If it took its author a lifetime to write, one can only feel gratitude that he did it". Roger Scruton described it as a "brilliant summary of story-telling". Views Booker's weekly columns in The Sunday Telegraph covered a wide range of topics of public interest. He has been described by British columnist James Delingpole in The Spectator as doing "the kind of proper, old-school things that journalists hardly ever bother with in this new age of aggregation and flip bloggery: he digs, he makes the calls, he reads the small print, he takes up the cause of the little man and campaigns, he speaks truth to power without fear or favour". On a range of health issues, Booker put forward a view that the public is being unnecessarily "scared", as detailed in his book Scared to Death. Thus, he argues that asbestos, passive smoking and BSE have not been shown to be dangerous. His articles on global warming have been challenged by George Monbiot of The Guardian. Booker said that white asbestos is "chemically identical to talcum powder" and poses a "non-existent" risk to human health, relying primarily on a 2000 paper for the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). He wrote in January 2002 that "HSE studies, including a paper by John Hodgson and Andrew Darnton in 2000, concluded that the risk from the substance is "virtually zero". In response, the HSE's Director General, Timothy Walker, wrote that Booker's articles on asbestos had been "misinformed and do little to increase public understanding of a very important occupational health issue." The HSE issued further rebuttals to articles written by Booker in both 2005 and in 2006. In an article in May 2008, Booker again cited the Hodgson and Darnton paper, claiming that 'they concluded that the risk