His story as history
Q: What do Succession star Brian Cox and Australia’s filmmaker Nadia Tass, of Malcolm* and Amy* fame, have in common?…
Dutton dressed as lamb – things you could never say to a female Labor MP
The hypocrisy of the Left never ceases to astonish. Having created a world where ‘words are literally violence’ and pretty…
FLiRT-ing with power: Labor wastes half a billion on Covid vaccines
Forgive my French, but are they taking the p…? Health authorities and regulatory bodies have not forgotten about Covid, even…
Are people afraid to put their name on the Covid Inquiry?
Of the 2,090 submissions to the Covid Response Inquiry, 1,021 declined to permit the author’s name to be published. That’s…
A budget about (nearly) nothing
The Australian Federal Budget gave us a couple of big headlines, but most of them were fake news. The Treasurer…
Who will destroy our freedoms?
The World Health Organisation (WHO), the health agency of the United Nations, is drafting a number of new documents which aim to radically change…
We and the ABS will not be fooled again!
The Albanese government is using taxpayers’ money and accounting tricks to cover up the inflationary pressures its own policies are exacerbating, particularly…
The balance of probabilities
Having emerged from the courtroom where Justice Michael Lee delivered his decision on the Lehrmann v Network Ten Pty Limited…
The Dark Ages in Australia were not so dark
Francesco di Petracco, better known as ‘Petrarch’, is rightly recognised as an artistic genius, the greatest scholar of his age,…
Same values, different beliefs?
Values and beliefs are not the same. People can support each other’s values while holding different beliefs. But if we…
Budget review: net zero cannibalises our prosperity
The public is receiving the Budget with a sense of bored irrelevance. People are pleased to see a $300 cut…
The illusion (or delusion?) of choice
One of the greatest misconceptions about Australian politics is that voters get a choice. You know what I mean. You…
Time to call out the Panda-huggers
Many people still refuse to believe that the Chinese Communist party is engaged in a multifaceted war against the West.…
Explaining vaccine hesitancy
According to the Department of Health’s current report on vaccination status, in the last six months, only 3.5 per cent…
The miserable death of multiculturalism
Does anyone remember Malcolm Turnbull going on about Australia being the most successful multicultural country in the world? He actually…
Terrible ideas that just won’t die
There are some terrible ideas that just won’t die. That’s because the progressives love them so much they’ll keep trying…
Israel at Eurovision
A funny thing happened on the way to the Eurovision Song Contest. The ethereal Russian Israeli entrant –Eden Golan –…
How the West lost the global war on terror
Clearly the West did not win the global war on terror because even in his wildest jihadi dreams al-Qaeda’s founder,…
Wong & Albo are a disgrace
On the 7th of October last year, the terrorist group Hamas committed the most foul attack upon Jewish people since…
‘Progressivism’ – what would Aristotle say?
Progressivism is reshaping our politics, society and economy. Are these changes evolutionary or revolutionary? Are they a passing phase or…
The brutal philosophy of Tyson Fury
Tyson Fury, the towering British behemoth with the quick wit and even quicker fists, is ready to fight Oleksandr Usyk.…
There’s nothing racist about Anglo-Saxons
One of the aims of progressives in higher education ought to be to use their privileged position to spread knowledge…
Britain’s diplomacy with Russia needs a rethink
A week after the UK expelled the Russian defence attaché, Colonel Maxim Yelovik, for being ‘an undeclared intelligence officer’, Russia…
A crackdown on bad cyclists can’t come soon enough
Doesn’t it sound wonderful? The police are eyeing a device that could immobilise electric bikes and electric scooters in a split second…
Why New Zealand is cracking down on immigration
The government of New Zealand this week tightened the country’s working visa rules in order to stem historically high numbers…
Why is New Zealand’s deputy PM rowing with Chumbawamba?
In their musical heyday, the English anarchist punk band Chumbawamba enjoyed a reputation for having an irreverent attitude towards those…
New Zealand’s imperial judiciary
If you cast your eyes across the Tasman right now, you can see the beginnings of an imperial judiciary, the…
Subversion within New Zealand
Recently querying why New Zealand governments make annual January pilgrimages to the Maori Pa at Ratana, to celebrate the birth…
Why is it so hard to be a Christian in public life?
Obscured by tattiness
A friend, with a lot more culture than your columnist, used to carry audio recordings of two works on her…
Dark and crooked byways
Isn’t it strange that the new television, the television of the streamers which has dominated our world since Covid, has…
The best and worst of the 2024 Met Gala
On Monday night, celebrities, designers and the highest edges of New York’s upper crust attended the biggest party of the…
Music as pasta
It’s sad to see that Sir Andrew Davis, the former head of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, has died. The man…
Kiwi life
Is it possible to be simultaneously entertained and depressed? Well, yes. Just try living in New Zealand in 2024. The…
Language
If your younger acquaintances start referring to you (or anything you do) as ‘mid’ they are not being polite. For…
The early tragedy of the flat season
The Flat season proper has opened with an almighty shock and a cruel tragedy. First City of Troy, the latest…
Is pro-golf eating itself?
Spare a thought for Manchester United’s Erik ten Hag. He’s got a fairly crummy, injury-hit team who appear to have…
The recklessness of George Mallory
George Mallory bookended the 20th century history of Everest with his pioneering attempts in the 1920s to climb the mountain…
Women on a wind-swept island: Hagstone, by Sinéad Gleeson, reviewed
This absorbing and wild debut feels at once muzzily folkloric and sharply contemporary. It follows Nell, an artist who lives…
Reading pulp fiction taught me how to write, said S.J. Perelman
This volume of short essays – originally written for the New Yorker in the 1940s and 1950s but never before…
Why are the German authorities so reluctant to believe in neo-Nazi attacks?
Enver Simsek’s life story was one familiar to many migrants. He moved from Turkey to a small town in Germany,…
Between the Iron Lady and the Wedding Cake: conflict in Belle Époque Paris
Between 1789 and 1871 Paris went through five kings, two Bonapartist empires, two republics, several revolutions and a Commune. Each…
Fools rush in: Mania, by Lionel Shriver, reviewed
Pearson Converse teaches literature at Verlaine University, Pennsylvania. She exists in an alternative universe to our own in which the…
More Mr Pooter than Joe Orton: George Lucas’s gay life in London
In January 1948, George Lucas, an unremarkable 21-year-old Roman Catholic who had just been demobbed from the Pay Corps, was…
Agent Zo: the Polish blonde with nerves of steel
In recent years, far from diminishing, the number of books on the Nazis, Occupied Europe and the Holocaust – events…