Adventures on Thought Crime Island
Britain has broken out the banhammer and is coming after your favourite comedians. It’s also decided words matter more than…
Harlotry in the collective of collectives
Who controls the mainstream media? Baldwin famously declared that moguls like Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook did, exercising power without…
Tilting laws to advance the feminist agenda
The icy grip of feminism on our key institutions has been exposed in a series of alarming stories emerging over…
Adventures on Thought Crime Island
Britain has broken out the banhammer and is coming after your favourite comedians. It’s also decided words matter more than…
Trump’s red line
One of the revelations of the 14 April military attack on three government sites in Syria by the United States,…
Manipulating Facebook
Judging by the way Mark Zuckerberg was cross-examined before Congress last week, you’d think Facebook was on the brink of…
Business/Robbery etc
Whacko! American farmers have now joined the Australian economy in being seriously at risk of collateral damage from ‘friendly fire’…
Patchwork power
The Australian summer has passed with only the occasional blackout, although a possibly grim winter, once unseasonably warm weather in…
Those dastardly, discommodious Delcons
Remember back to the time of the coup against Tony Abbott when the great and the good (I speak loosely…
Heather Mitchell
This probably is a bad idea; I mean writing a column about a transgender person. Even Germain Greer got herself…
Installation view Colours of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay
The French are sharing some of their beautiful visual heritage with us right now. At the AGNSW are the wonderful…
Cartier London Halo Tiara 1936
We’ve grown used to fashion and related objects being the subject of exhibitions at our major galleries but a commercially…
Kathryn Stott
It may not be paradise in every respect, but Townsville in mid-winter could be a reasonable approximation. The Australian Festival…
Texas: the myriad contradictions of the Lone Star state
The subtitle of Lawrence Wright’s splendid God Save Texas (‘A Journey into the Future of America’) would be alarming if…
Is there no end to books on the ‘end of France’?
Here is a detail that says a lot. In the French translation of this latest book by the Israeli historian…
Did the Grenfell Tower fire put paid to the social housing ideal?
As a schoolboy, I used to go round to my best mate Mike’s home. It was a good place: a…
For the man who has everything, only a space rocket will do
Today’s VHNWI wants a PRSHLS. That’s Very High Net-Worth Individual and Partially Reuseable Super Heavy Lift System. Or, in the…
Guess who’s coming to dinner with Angela Huth?
Anglea Huth, the broadcaster and author of some 18 books, has now written her memoirs, Not the Whole Story. And…
Pathos and humanity in pictures of abject misery
In 1971 the late Linda Nochlin burst onto the public scene with her groundbreaking essay, ‘Why Have There Been No…
What does John Gray’s anti-atheism amount to?
K. Chesterton, in one of his wise and gracious apothegms, once wrote that ‘When Man ceases to worship God he…
Our sheltered lives have made us overly fearful: Aminatta Forna’s Happiness reviewed
In her keynote lecture for a conference on ‘The Muse and the Market’ in 2015 Aminatta Forna mounted a powerful…
There’s much of Astrid Lindgren in the carrot-haired rebel Pippi Longstocking
Pippi Longstocking is a nine-year-old girl who lives alone with a monkey and horse in a cottage called Villa Villekulla…
The codes and codswallop surrounding Leonardo da Vinci
‘If you look at walls soiled with a variety of stains or at stones with variegated patterns,’ Leonardo da Vinci…
The changing face of war and heroism
On War and Writing by Samuel Hynes is hardly about war at all. There is little about combat here, or…
Henry Miller — pornographer or prophet?
Few writers seem less deserving of resuscitation than Henry Miller. When the Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside was asked…
