Britain is heading towards a soft Brexit or a second referendum
Unless Theresa May delays the vote, 11 December 2018 might be about to become one of the most important in…
From red-shirts to red shoes
Maybe like Dorothy of the ruby red shoes former foreign minister Julie Bishop is hoping that the scarlet stilettos she…
Slippery oil industry
When oil prices spiked to $US140 ($A193.85) a barrel in 2008, veteran analysts declared that prices would reach $US200 or…
Show me the man…
‘Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,’ secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria assured the equally loathsome mass-murderer…
Making a hash of the climate debate
According much of the media, last Friday’s climate change ‘strike’ staged by school students across Australia was an epoch-making moment…
Sleight of hand of the ‘moderates’
Ever heard of the wonderful American magician team of Penn & Teller? My son and I saw them in Vegas…
Life tips for getting ahead in the modern era
Malcolm Fraser said life wasn’t meant to be easy and then went and joined the Greens anyway. So here are…
Battle of Britain, MkII
The European Union has never tolerated democracy. It preaches it to its member states and lectures about it to the…
Quit Paris, halve migration
The Victorian election demonstrates a desperate need for powerful leadership based on principle, something last seen in the 2013 Abbott…
Banjo
He was a solicitor, journalist,war correspondent, soldier, grazier but, most importantly, a poet. Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson CBE (1864-1941) was…
John William Waterhouse.The Lady of Shalott 1888 oil on canvas.
That a poet could enjoy huge popularity in mid-career and still be popularly admired more than a century after his…
Richard Tognetti and the ACO
As leader of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Richard Tognetti has never done quite what was expected, other than to be…
Helen Thomson and Caroline Brazier
By my count, the 2019 Season will be the 40th produced by the Sydney Theatre Company. The coming season is…
Edward Gorey: master of the macabre
‘A is for Amy who fell down the stairs/ B is for Basil, assaulted by bears…’ The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an…
Elizabeth II: Queen of tact and diplomacy
In her 66 years on the throne the Queen has represented Britain on official visits to at least 126 countries…
Shades of Lord Lucan: A Double Life, by Flynn Berry, reviewed
A young girl finds the body of her nanny, brutally murdered, and the barely moving form of her mother, a…
Family favourites: children’s books for Christmas reviewed
There’s no shortage of magical rings in the children’s canon, the sort of things that usefully make you invisible or…
The scandalous swamp of Indian politics
Picture India in 1991. You need to make several trips to Delhi and wait three years to import a computer.…
The gambler and the hooker: Awful Beauty, by Andrei Navrozov, reviewed
This book — the title is from Pasternak —is billed as ‘literary fiction’. The narrator, a Russian gambler and drinker…
Tell them of Battles, Kings and Elephants, by Mathias Enard, reviewed
Michelangelo seems never to have travelled to Turkey to advise the Sultan on a bridge to span the Golden Horn,…
A real-life Bluebeard: on the track of France’s most notorious serial killer
From Colette to Rudyard Kipling, celebrities flocked for front-row seats at the 1921 trial of Henri Landru, the notorious ‘lonely…
What links fairy tales, Karl Marx, Anne Frank and St Augustine?
Its Booker-longlist nomination meant that Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina (Granta, £16.99) was the comic that everyone has heard of this year,…
Is Lionel Messi the greatest footballer of all time?
If you don’t know who Lionel Messi is you won’t enjoy this book much. If you do, you probably will.…
Chains and planes: Turbulence, by David Szalay, reviewed
In the opening pages of Turbulence, a woman in her seventies, who is visiting her sick son in Notting Hill,…
Michelle Obama: ‘I was happy that Barack’s career came first’
‘To me, he was sort of like a unicorn,’ writes Mrs Obama, looking back on her courtship days with Barack.…