Trump towers
In his 1977 book The Age of Uncertainty, the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith depicted the great leaders of history…
Xena madness
For sheer grotesquerie, a recent push for the feminisation of the Australian Army would be hard to beat. Former General…
Heart of darkness
Sometimes African rulers get so corrupt that Western aid donors go on strike. Take what Trump would call the shit-hole…
Pride stripped bare
Every now and again the clouds part, a shaft of light breaks through and something up ahead is illuminated. In…
Trump towers
In his 1977 book The Age of Uncertainty, the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith depicted the great leaders of history…
Theatre of the absurd
The controversial University of Melbourne dance performance, Where We Stand, is an insight into the kind of divided society we…
Nobel laureates manqués
Calls for a Nobel Peace Prize for Donald Trump reminded me that if anyone should be a Nobel Laureate, it…
Closing down sale
When an historic Melbourne church went up in flames three years ago, the actress Rachel Griffiths, who’d made her First…
Not our ABC
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is a $1.04 billion piece of public policy and we treat it as exactly that: a…
Giorgio de Chirico Gare Montparnasse
The other morning, the Director of MoMA from New York, Glenn D Lowry was on ABC Breakfast. He was knowledgable…
Michael Lewis as Rigoletto
Sir Walter Scott published The Bride of Lammermoor in 1819 as one of his hugely successful Waverley novels which captured…
Kororadika Beach by Augustus Earle
Antiquarians can seem an exotic group to many of us and yet there are several successful dealers in this country,…
Culture buff
George Bernard Shaw called it ‘a chronicle play’, I suppose a sort of docudrama if a superior one. Saint Joan…
The short step from good manners to lofty imperialism
In the gap between what we feel ourselves to be and what we imagine we might in different circumstances become,…
How Steven Spurrier enraged the French — and was never forgiven
Fine wine rarely makes it into the public consciousness, but one event in 1976 has proved of perennial interest: the…
From Don Quixote to My Struggle — a survey of the novel in 160 pages
I wonder what your idea of a good novel is. Does it embody the attributes of solid plotting, characterisation and…
A Shout in the Ruins, by Kevin Powers, reviewed
We’re in Virginia, in the 1850s. A girl called Emily is tormenting her dog, Champion, and her father’s teenage slave,…
Death-defying acts and the dark side of the circus
In 2013 Tessa Fontaine joined up with the World of Wonders, a circus sideshow that travels around the United States…
Swept away by Hitler’s charisma: German women gush over the Führer
The distinguished historian Konrad Jarausch’s new book is a German narrative, told through the stories of ordinary people who lived…
Dickens and Agatha Christie made my childhood bearable
Girl with Dove is a memoir by Sally Bayley, a writer who teaches at Oxford University, of growing up in…
When trendy ideas capture the ruling elite, democracy can go hang
If social media manipulation has influenced elections, and dark money has influenced our elected representatives, then we are already on…
Lucia, by Alex Pheby, reviewed
In 1988, James Joyce’s grandson Stephen destroyed all letters he had from, to or about his aunt Lucia Joyce, the…
It took a long time for de Gaulle to become ‘de Gaulle’
When General de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs in 1954, he signed only four presentation copies:…
The story of the last living survivor of the Atlantic slave trade is a high adventure
Zora Neale Hurston, the African-American novelist-ethnographer, was a luminary of the New Negro Movement, later renamed by American scholars the…
The scandal of American shipping – incompetence, venality and shocking safety standards
‘We are globalisation,’ a senior executive at the shipping company Maersk told me. ‘We enable it, and we have questions…
