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That would seem to be a question best left to a professional. He certainly comes across as obsessive. But there's often an easy conversational tone. At other places, it's much more formal. Of course, he acknowledges killing 93 people, so many would consider that a mental problem right there.

Well in this particular case I don't think anyone is calling it a two-sided problem. He's clearly a right-winger, and it's interesting that his targets were young people associated with the social democratic Labor Party, rather than Muslims themselves.

This is a question that a lot of people are asking, not least in Norway itself. French police today visited the suspect's father, but it's not clear if they turned up anything of interest. The prosecution in Oslo asked today for Breivik to be put in detention for at least eight weeks while they investigate the case.

OK, this is an American website that I'm not too familiar with, because I was working the Norwegian end of things. But I believe to the extent you could say Breivik has an ideology, it would be compatible with libertarianism. Interestingly, he's very critical of neo-nazis, who you might expect to be on his side. But he thinks Hitler's persecution of the Jews opened the door to Islamic jihad in the Middle East, and, by extension, Europe.

I can't speak to who was targeted when on the island, but there is a revealing passage in his diary where he talks about how attractive he must be to the young women in the little farming village where he had set up his explosives factory. In his imagination he was cultivated, urbane, appealing. I bet the women there didn't see him the same way.

He definitely wanted it to be made public. In fact, the police didn't find it. He posted it on a website, from which it was picked up by other websites. It's a real manifesto--a call for revolution, in essence.

It's entirely unprecedented in Norway. It's worse than any single act the Germans did against Norwegians during World War II, on Norwegian soil. I'm inclined to withhold judgment on the terror cells he says he has been working with: maybe he has, or maybe he's trying to appear a bit grandiose. He's a fan of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb, and talks a fair amount about the Russians. So maybe there's something there. The thing about Norway, though, is that it had a right-wing extremist movement in the late 20th century, but it has fallen into decline. So this really came out of the blue. A threat assessment compiled last winter by the domestic security agency predicted a lessening of right-wing threats.

I spoke with a Norwegian woman who was out in Oslo the day after the shooting, and she said that when an Islamic person does something bad, the reaction is always, "Oh, it's the Muslims." But when a white Protestant does something bad like this, everyone says, "He must be crazy."

Yes, a better explanation.

I'm not an expert on European laws, but Norway has a very outdoorsy culture and plenty of people do have firearms there. Whether these were licensed is of course going to be one of the first questions to be investigated.

I believe that the judge doesn't consider a remand hearing the proper time for someone to make his case, and I would speculate that the judge wants this to be about the crimes and not the politics. As for the Masonic lodge, you don't want to paint with too broad a brush.