Lies, leeches and Chinese whispers: one not so enchanted summit
What was that Malcolm Turnbull once said about “the prime minister who broke the nation’s heart”? Whatever the case, he…
Je suis Fredo
I have pondered for some time why President Trump is so disliked by all the mainstream media. I am using…
If Raheem Kassam should be banned from Australia, what about that thug George O’Dowd?
According to grandstanding Senator Kristina Keneally, commentator Raheem Kassam should have been banned from entry to Australia. Kassam, who offhandedly…
Nightmare feminism
#MeToo is like a malignant cancer that multiplies and spreads. It attacks the white blood cells. It attacks the immune…
It’s gender inequality – but not like you’ve seen it
A team of researchers from the University of Missouri and the University of Essex have produced a new way of measuring…
What the world can learn from Australia’s immigration policy
It’s often said that it does not matter if you are a slow learner, so long as you are able…
EXCLUSIVE: After Sydney – Raheem Kassam on stabbing the messenger
If Kristina Keneally and her Labor cohorts were to be believed, it would not have been “Allahu akbar” the stabber…
What’s woke this week
I’ve been away from the world of woke for a while and it’s depressing to see just how well it’s…
The magic and mystery of English cricket
Nothing in cricket is quite as visceral, even quite as primeval, as the confrontation between a batsmen of the highest…
Give Hong Kongers real security: a British passport
We seem to be building up to a second Tiananmen Square, 30 years after the first. This time the venue…
Was I wrong about Boris Johnson?
The Conservative commentariat does not march in step. Myself, along with Matthew Parris, Max Hastings and Simon Heffer are proud, stiff-necked…
The battle cry of the politically homeless
Like millions of other Americans, I’m exhausted. But I’m not tired from #Resisting or tired from screaming at a MAGA…
Keneally sells out
It is not the easiest thing in the world to cause a stir among conservatives. They are often described as…
Business/Robbery etc
Having turned 80 last month and 12 years out of office, Australia’s 25th Prime Minister John Winston Howard’s occasional and…
The day the news died
Hollywood blockbusters are not normally the place one finds insight, but a new action thriller recently provided an unexpected reflection…
Nihilism nirvana
If you were to believe some politicians and journalists, the recent mass killings in El Paso, Texas and Christchurch, New…
We are only half-reconciled
Senator Pat Dodson, often called the ‘father of reconciliation’, said last week that political leaders had failed to reconcile with…
Four freedoms
Is it time for Australia to legislate for a minimalist bill of rights? Now, before you scream ‘Not as long…
True leadership personified
Although Napoleon said that every soldier carries a field-marshal’s baton in his knapsack, great leaders are rare. Since Churchill, the…
NSW botches abortion
‘The sound of men arguing over our personal reproductive health choices hurts my ears and it offends my very core,’…
Maxine Peake
We live in a time of paradoxes. The NSW Parliament has just legislated for terminations to be performed from 22…
Sylvia in Houston
Houston is a prosperous Texan city, the hub of the US oil and gas industries. And home to the city’s…
Dominic Smith
He’s an Australian-born international best-selling author. Dominic Smith was born in Brisbane in 1971 to an Australian mother and an…
King’s College choristers at ease
It was a beautiful autumn morning when we went up to Cambridge for a meeting at King’s College. Christopher Hogwood…
Migration in Europe is the ripple effect of the second world war
Two words may pique the reader’s interest on the cover of this timely, panoramic history of Europe by the distinguished…
Popular medical non-fiction will soon have covered every human body part
Nobody warns you when you start medical school that your career decisions have only just begun. Up to a decade…
Pity poor Candace Bushnell, still flogging Sex and the City at 60
On paper, Candace Bushnell and the medieval warlord El Cid don’t have a lot in common. The first made a…
A novel take on the Western: Inland, by Téa Obreht, reviewed
Téa Obreht’s second novel is an expansive and ambitious subversion of Western tropes, set in fin de siècle America. We…
The trail-blazing women writers of the 1960s were quite different from the male Angries
The accepted story of mid-20th century culture in Britain belongs to the boys: the British Invasion, Beyond the Fringe and…
Walter Bagehot: the revered Victorian who got almost everything wrong
Who was Walter Bagehot? For generations of politics students he has been the all-but-unpronounceable — Bayge-hot? Baggott? — author of…
Does Kim Jong-un deliberately emulate a Bond villain?
North Korea watchers are good book-buyers, rarely able to resist scratching that itch of interest caused by the world’s worst…
Homage to Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor
It is not often that a book’s blurb gives any idea of what’s inside, but Helen Castor’s endorsement — ‘a…