Fighting fires
Won’t somebody please think of the ABC journos?
In a salient display of a free press and journalistic independence, the Australian government-owned national broadcaster has taken the Australian…
Jordan Peterson and how the left seek to destroy those it hates
Jordan Peterson, one of the world’s leading intellectuals and a twenty-first-century champion of academic truth has just passed through one of the most…
The left’s hypocrisy on “racism”
It’s just as well the left keeps losing elections around the world – worse than losing votes; they’ve lost the…
The Minister, Sir Humphrey and Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s grant
The Australia Council was the creation of the Whitlam government and, in the last round of grant recipients, to the…
So you think you’re a classical liberal?
A fair number of people nowadays are announcing that they’re classical liberals. An apparently more or less equal number of…
Don’t mention the pandemic
The Woke Health Organisation – sorry, the World Health Organisation – continues to provide non-stop entertainment as the Coronavirus spreads.…
What’s woke this week
This week kids’ cartoons that will turn your little darlings into global capitalists, Big Brother policing of fashion faux pas,…
Love and Thoms: this isn’t closing the gap, but entrenching our differences
Friends, Romans, Countrymen – Lend me your ears and hear my words. This week the High Court of Australia handed…
The BBC’s big problem is its obsession with itself
One reason people are disillusioned with the BBC is its obsession with itself. Here is the text of a question…
The coronavirus is China’s biggest test since Tiananmen Square
Over 1,500 Chinese have died from the coronavirus, with tens of millions quarantined in their own homes. President Xi is…
The Spectator becomes the world’s longest-lived current affairs magazine
This weekend The Spectator reaches a truly historic milestone. For forty years, it has been the oldest current-affairs or literary…
Write off Bloomberg’s meme army at your own peril
Michael Bloomberg is everywhere. If you watch a YouTube video, there’s a Bloomberg 2020 ad. If you live in any…
Entebbe: the sequel
The Arab League has joined the Organization of Islamic Countries in formally rejecting the Trump plan to end the Israeli-Palestinian…
Go slow ScoMo
Hard to believe, I know, but the Morrison government is just about to hit its nine-month anniversary since its surprise…
Beagle love
There are various ways for a man in an extramarital affair to clandestinely communicate with his paramour — from furtively…
Roaring into the Twenties
When Ricky Gervais came roaring onto the stage at the recent Golden Globe awards, he cemented his place as the…
Dog of a fight
Like a latter-day Snoopy, Barnaby Joyce has been dreaming of bringing down the Red Baron —Nats’ leader Michael McCormack— ever…
Thought control through fear
I walked the streets of Leipzig last month, 75 years since it was handed over from Nazi to Communist tyranny.…
Aux Bien Pensants
A passenger on MV Zaandam from Buenos Aires to the Antarctic last week, I was reminded of the warning by…
Business/Robbery etc
Hankering for a return to the good old days when Britain was Australia’s biggest export market as the Poms consumed…
No Pay? No Way!
As a sort of protest, I am not going to the opening of No Pay? No Way! at the Sydney…
The Happy Prince
Many people have had a go at it. Ever since Oscar Wilde published The Happy Prince and Other Tales in…
Luca Micheletti and Anna Dowsley
A taciturn Glaswegian and an unlikely knight of the realm, David McVicar has directed several of Opera Australia’s most admired…
Marta Dusseldorp
Known throughout his life as Dick, Gerardus Dusseldorp had just come to Australia and created Civil and Civic (later Lend…
Unspeakably prolix and petty: will anyone want to read John Bercow’s autobiography?
John Bercow obviously intended his book to annoy people, and he’s certainly succeeded in that. MPs who don’t find their…
Death in the Cape – the lonely fate of Mary Kingsley
What compelled three well-known British writers to leave their homes and travel 6,000 miles to participate in a nasty late-19th-century…
The stomach for the fight: cooking for Churchill during the war
Georgina Landemare cooked for the Churchill family in all their kitchens, during the 1930s and 1940s. She got as close…
There’s something hot about a hat
When an American describes a woman as wearing a ‘Park Avenue Helmet’ you know exactly what is meant. This is…
Philip Hensher’s latest novel is a State of the Soul book
This is a very nuanced and subtle novel by Philip Hensher, which manages the highwire act of treating its characters…
A dark emerald set in the Irish laureate’s fictional tiara: Actress, by Anne Enright, reviewed
Actress is the novel Anne Enright has been rehearsing since her first collection of stories, The Portable Virgin (1991). It…
Hiding from the Gestapo in plain sight in Berlin
Of the many bleak moments that have lodged in my mind since reading this extraordinary book the most unshakeable is…
How long is long enough to look at a work of art?
There is a vogue at the moment for books which use art as a vehicle for examining the writer’s wider…