CBD: and now for the AA meetings
Our peeved yet perspicacious political insider writes exclusively: Excessive self-medication in the wake, if not at the wake, of the…
Fresh miracles in Galilee – the Galilee Basin, that is
The proposed Adani mine has been wading through a green swamp of political obstacles for nine long years. Other coal…
The Coalition’s back: time to get real on jobs and pay
The Australian people have spoken and re-elected a Coalition government. But don’t be surprised if the big unions ignore their…
Let’s end the Age of Bitterness in our politics
With just a little bit of Aussie bloomin’ luck, the destabilising and destructive approach to the dark art of politics…
How we’ve turned mad – half mad, anyway
Two numbers in the low forties popped up in two separate stories this week: Americans today are more closely divided…
Chris Bowen’s out, but will Albo heed his warning on religious freedom?
It is slowly starting to dawn on some Labor voters that Australians with a traditional Christian worldview are feeling somewhat…
Ten more reasons Labor lost the unlosable election
Most people I speak to think that as a nation, we just dodged a bullet. And even those who voted…
The app that could see GetUp downed
In an era where political parties and policy advocates on the right are struggling to find new ways to engage…
Brexit means Boris
A few months before he died in 2007, the famous journalist Bill Deedes asked if I would come to see…
Brexit and the great liberal crack-up
Brexit may yet kill the Conservative party but it is exacting a cruel psychological torture on liberalism. Liberals are supposed…
The hounding of Hope Hicks and the desperation of the Democrats
Oscar Wilde once observed that only very superficial people don’t judge things by their appearances. Like many of Wilde’s quips,…
Trump told me I got a ‘bad rap’
I owe my return to these pages to the pardon I have received from the President of the United States.…
ScoMoses
Scott Morrison, having parted Labor’s red sea and led his astonished people to the promised land, must seize his Moses…
If the ABC is so trustworthy, why isn’t anybody watching it?
Here’s a question. Who said this recently, about the ABC: ‘The ABC is one of Australia’s most important institutions. Now,…
Business/Robbery etc
Bob Hawke and Sir Peter Abeles; Bill Shorten and Anthony Pratt. What is it that attracts such close friendships between…
The sloppiest suicide note
‘No-one saw it coming,’ the shocked commentariat claimed. Goodness. Where are the ABC’s fact checkers when you need them? In…
The immigration iceberg
In the Middle Ages the periodic return of plague from the Middle East to communities throughout Europe killed off possibly…
It was The Speccie wot won it
‘No body saw it coming,’ the mainstream media repeated endlessly when results emerged on Saturday evening 18 May, contrary to…
Dirty dancing with Fannie and Freddie
You don’t need a crystal ball to see that whoever wins our federal election, the taxpayer is going to be…
All the news that’s fit to spin
Idly watching the ABC’s idea of news one evening and hearing for the thousandth time how man’s greed and indifference…
Captain James Cook. Wedgwood and Bentley, c.1779
Three speakers: one is Director of The Royal Collection comprising over a million objects in 13 royal residences across the…
John Beard Edmund (+Bill)
I don’t imagine the newest member of the Royal Family was named after the Archibald Prize but it was a…
Broadway production of Come From Away
We all remember where we were when first hearing of 9/11. Some people were on trans-Atlantic flights. When the US…
Royal portraits at Bendigo
One of our favourite places in London is in St Martin’s Place, just around the corner from Trafalgar Square and…
Towards a technological utopia
The rebranding of John Browne has been a long and, to those of us living overseas, instructive affair. Readers will…
Passing bells for old Tokyo
In Edo (now Tokyo), before the Meiji restoration, bells marked the beginning of each hour. The hours were named after…
Oddballs of English philosophy
Charles Kay Ogden once proposed that conversations would be conducted more efficiently if participants wore masks. Apart from confirming the…
Bach helped me survive Bergen-Belsen
One of the great joys of the 18th-century novella La petite maison is the way Jean-François de Bastide matches the…
Last lines on Brexit from Geoffrey Hill
In 2012 OUP published Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Poems; they could have waited, because they’re now going to need another edition.…
Brutish Brits: You Will Be Safe Here, by Damian Barr, reviewed
Damian Barr explains the upsetting genesis of his impressive debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here, in his acknowledgements: This…
The celebrated poet who’s been erased from English literature
Biographers are a shady lot. For all their claims about immortalising someone in print, as if their ink were a…
Parallel worlds: The Heavens, by Sandra Newman, reviewed
The Heavens is Sandra Newman’s eighth book. It follows novels featuring, variously, sex addiction, Buddhism and a post-apocalyptic teen dystopia;…
Gothic extremes of human cruelty: Cari Mora, by Thomas Harris, reviewed
It has been 13 years since Thomas Harris published a novel, and the last time he published one without Hannibal…
Feminism for the Fleabag generation: The Polyglot Lovers, by Lina Wolff, reviewed
Everyone behaves badly in The Polyglot Lovers — no saving graces. It’s a complex, shifting structure of sex, self-hatred and…
Drawing from the deck: superb sketches by sailors
Working in the Public Record Office some years ago, I ordered up the logbook of the badly damaged HMS Scylla…
It’s judo, not chess, that’s Putin’s game
These two refreshingly concise books address the same question from different angles: how should we deal with Russia? Mark Galeotti…