Tying the Gordian knot
The same sex marriage push didn’t just appear overnight. It’s the result of carefully crafted campaigns by US homosexuals with…
A Millenial changes her mind
Spectator Australia contributor Anne Gallagher is currently overseas and received this letter from her 17-year old daughter. It is reproduced…
The inconvenient truth about Al Gore
A decade ago Al Gore released his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Second only to 9/11 it was the decade’s most…
Tying the Gordian knot
The same sex marriage push didn’t just appear overnight. It’s the result of carefully crafted campaigns by US homosexuals with…
Unlearning truth
Nearly ten months on, the University of Sydney appears to be coming to grips with the fact that Donald Trump…
Turnbull, SSM and the culture wars
In his capacity as an individual, Malcolm Turnbull has just as much right to an opinion on same-sex marriage as…
What Trojan horse?
One popular metaphor used by No campaigners is that of the Trojan horse. Same-sex marriage will, the metaphor suggests, introduce…
Business/Robbery etc
Created by a combination of federal political incompetence and ideology-based state stupidity, it is sovereign risk, above all else, that…
Puppet masters and useful idiots
A few years ago I returned to Sydney after nearly a life-time spent working in England. With my interest in…
Thomas Hampson
Sir Andrew Davis became Chief Conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2013 and, happily, will continue until the end…
Vivica Genaux
Founded in 2002, Pinchgut Opera has presented 19 rarely performed works with such distinction that its audience has grown along…
Anne-Sophie Mutter
These are good times for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Chief Conductor Davis Robertson announced a glamorous 2018 Season. The Board…
Marion Hall Best in Marimekko, 1968
Her shop was one of the glories of Rowe Street, itself one of the glories of old Sydney, before it…
Learning to talk
One of the great achievements of science is that so many of its branches, from astronomy to zoology, have been…
Deep learning
Given the brilliance of his career as a fiction-writer, it is easy to forget that J.M. Coetzee has a commensurate…
Harsh, but entertaining
When millionaires become billionaires they become even greedier and more ruthless. At the highest level, Trumpian economics can be lethal.…
The cult of Holy Bob
The Harder They Come, Jamaica’s first (and still finest) home-grown film, was released in 1972 with the local singer Jimmy…
The hunger
In 1933 my aunt Lenina Bibikova was eight years old. She lived in Kharkov, Ukraine. Every morning a polished black…
Muddled in minutiae
‘Publitical’ is a neologism worth avoiding. Bill Goldstein uses it to describe T.S. Eliot’s activities when launching and promoting his…
Demonised by history
Some oleaginous interviewer once suggested to Winston Churchill that he was the greatest Briton who ever lived. The grand old…
Britain über alles
David Cannadine was a schoolboy in 1950s Birmingham, which was still recognisable as the city that Joseph Chamberlain had…
A game of cat-and-mouse
All Involved, Ryan Gattis’s breakout novel about the LA riots of 1992, was an absolute blast. Ballsy, vivid and immersive,…
True grit
As literary editor of the Sunday Times in the early 1980s, when the rest of the editorial staff routinely papered…
Raising Cain
It is a pretty safe bet that for every 1,000 people who know of William Wilberforce, no more than the…
Folk-tale redux
Daniel and his big sister, Cathy, do not go to school. They live with their father, a gargantuan former prizefighter,…
