The ‘sex worker’ myth
In the midst of all the outrage about modern-day slavery, usually vulnerable men forced into manual labour, there is actually…
Tips, and other tips
People no longer know how to use restaurants. Maybe they’ve lost the knack. Is it because Australians can’t afford to…
The freedom conundrum
Recently I attended the Centre for Policy Studies’ Margaret Thatcher Conference on Security 2017 at the august Guildhall in the…
Love is a many-gendered thing
Dateline anywhere in Australia, three or four years from now. Spring is around the corner and love is in the…
But is it art…?
In the 1950s a childless couple in the deserts of California set about creating their own family. Calvin and Ruby…
Draining Donald Trump
Big Brother is now stage centre in American political life. The recent appearance in the Washington Post of the transcript…
Aux bien pensants
Say Yes to No Just as the appeasement of Nazi Germany ended with Chamberlain’s Declaration of War at 11.15am on…
Jesus in the playground
It emerged last fortnight that Queensland’s Department of Education wants to ban primary school students from talking about Jesus. Kate…
Our survey proves just how horrible you are
This month the Australian Human Rights Commission lied to the nation. And it knows it did. It told Australians that…
Sir Andrew Davis
Operas are subject to changes in fashion, suffering long periods of neglect. One such opera is Thaïs by Jules Massenet.…
Marble relief of a Roman trireme
Readers of Robert Harris’ thriller Pompeii might think they know a great deal about the devastating eruption of Mt Vesuvius…
Simone Young
She’s a local girl who made good — really good. Simone Young was born, educated and trained in Sydney. She…
The Father
A co-production by MTC and STC of a new play which has been acclaimed in Paris, London and New York…
The turf
‘Racing isn’t a team sport,’ the diehards used to tell us about the Shergar Cup, Ascot’s annual contest for three-rider…
High life
As Jacob Rees-Mogg said in a different context, a happy birthday at my age is a terminological inexactitude. I needed…
Real life
Easier by far to load up my horses and move them to the next village than try to fight the…
What has the Premier League ever done for us?
Football’s back, I’m afraid, and, in the imperishable words of David Mitchell, every kick in every game matters to someone,…
Low life
On Sunday morning we went, Oscar and I, to a vide grenier in the ancient, picturesque Provençal village. Vide grenier…
Hunt-the-iPhone was the highlight of my hols
For years, Caroline and I have been squabbling over where to spend our summer holidays. Her ideal is a family-friendly…
The man who disappeared
Walking out of one’s own life — unpredictably, perhaps even without premeditation and certainly without anything approaching a plan —…
Change and decay
Writing of his grandmother’s cremation, Kushanava Choudhury reflects in The Epic City that, while his expatriate Indian cousins are separated…
In Woolf’s clothing
Martin Amis once said that the writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety. While one part of your brain…
The end of brotherly love
You can never completely leave a religious cult, as this strange and touching memoir demonstrates. Patterns of thinking, turns of…
A bad taste in the mouth
Here is the opening sentence of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s meditation on beds.: With its four legs and its flat, soft…
The roots of witchcraft
Until the mid-1960s many historians believed witchcraft was a pre-Christian pagan fertility ritual, witches worshipping the Horned God, whose consort…
The search for meaning
He’s not what you’d call prolific, Bernard MacLaverty. Midwinter Break is his fifth novel in 40 years, and his first…
A countercultural upheaval
‘New York stories in a way are always real estate stories,’ says the journalist Alan Light in Lizzy Goodman’s bustling…
Two enquiring minds
Samuel Pepys, wrote John Evelyn, was ‘universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things’ and ‘skilled in music’. John Evelyn,…
Watching from the wings
The story of Sweetpea Slight is a footnote to a footnote in the annals of British theatre. Even her name…
A clash of creeds
This is a very modern novel. Terrorist atrocity sits side by side with the familiar and the mundane. Where better…
Flights of fancy
Levitation. We all know what it is: the ‘disregard for gravity’, as Peter Adey puts it in his new book,…
