Is Macron’s vanity presidency already falling apart?
For a man with a reputation as a bit of an egghead, Emmanuel Macron has acquired a sudden passion for…
Abbott’s mission
As Adam Smith once observed, in most nations there’s often a lot of ruin. His point was that it takes…
The game’s up. Or is it?
A state division of the Liberal Party will have a State Conference on 2-3 September 2017 to debate the introduction…
Woolf works
‘What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you,’ Virginia Woolf composed in…
Batteries fail to spark
Elon Musk is such a good salesman that, despite formidable and blindingly obvious problems, he has managed to convince everyone…
Ideological evasion
Malcolm Turnbull’s speech to London think tank Policy Exchange on 11 July provided an insight into his government’s ideology, and…
Tony, Donald and the X Factor
Ernst Bertram’s study Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie was published in 1918, but its first English translation, under the subtitle Attempt…
Business/Robbery etc
July is a wonderful month, blessed by federal parliament not sitting and so temporarily depriving the Turnbull government of opportunities…
Economical with… free speech
The Spycatcher trial established Malcolm Turnbull’s reputation at the time as a brilliant champion of free speech. Personally, reviewing a…
The Father
A co-production by MTC and STC of a new play which has been acclaimed in Paris, London and New York…
Grace Cossington Smith, The bridge in building 1929
The viewer could treat this exhibition as an exercise in ‘compare and contrast’, or follow my preference and simply enjoy…
Nadine Garner
Three women who shared a flat as university freshers in 1983 and have maintained their friendship through the years are…
Alan Moorehead
He left Melbourne in 1936 to become a famous writer, and he did. Not just a famous writer but a…
High Life
Greece I am surfing along the Cycladic islands on Puritan, a 125ft classic that was launched in 1929 by…
Low life
‘We are always waiting for somebody,’ observed a vexed British journalist. Usually it was me they were waiting for, but…
Real life
Quite stoically, I was mountaineering on my hands and knees over a sea of rubble to get to the temporary…
Now I get it – Corbyn is the new Murdoch
For our 16th wedding anniversary, Caroline and I went to the Almeida Theatre to see Ink, a new play about…
Low life
Valencia was a furnace. During the short ride from the airport, the taxi driver supplemented his chat about the weather…
Spirits from the vasty deep…
‘The sea defines us, connects us, separates us,’ Philip Hoare has written. His prize-winning Leviathan, then a collection of essays…
Towering extravagance
The Shard is an unnecessary building. Nobody apart from its developer asked for it to be built. Nobody was crying…
Rules of behaviour
It’s the constant dilemma of the pop science author: how to write something flashy enough to grab readers, but solid…
Down – if not out – in Paris
Virginie Despentes remains best known in this country for her 1993 debut novel, Baise-Moi, about two abused young women who…
A cacophony of complaint
What sort of monster gives a bad review to a book by someone who was gang raped as a 12-year-old…
His own worst enemy
One fail-safe test of a writer’s reputation is to see how many times his or her books get taken out…
The dark side of creativity
In Eureka, Anthony Quinn gives us all the enjoyable froth we could hope for in a novel about making a…
Black prince or white knight?
We cannot know for sure how Edward the Black Prince earned his sobriquet. For some it was the volatile mixture…
Drowning in mud and blood
George Orwell’s suggestion that the British remember only the military disasters of the first world war is certainly being borne…
… trailing strands in all directions
Letters of Intent — letters of the intense. Keen readers of Cynthia Ozick (are there any other kind?) will of…
Playing Stalin for laughs
Christopher Wilson’s new novel is much easier to enjoy than to categorise. And ‘enjoy’ is definitely the right word, even…
The new age of the refugee
After years of estrangement in a foreign land, what can immigrants expect to find on their return home? The remembered…