Married at First Sight and the unkindness of strangers
Critics ask, ‘why MAFS’ – and it is certainly a polarising topic. This take, for example: ‘Fucking hard hitting journalism…
The green-left war on God becomes a poll fight
One of the things that the Left hates the most is religion. And unfortunately, New South Wales Labor contains a…
Doctors are doctors, not philosopher kings
Doctors swear on the Hippocratic Oath that they will “first do no harm”, yet they pay little attention to the…
Switching off a nation: no-coal Germany
In 19 years’ time, Germany will have no more coal mines and coal power plants, bringing to an end hundreds…
Treaty, nuh
The Victorian government, having passed legislation to authorise negotiation with Aboriginal Victorians, is advancing towards a formal treaty. Despite the…
Ignore Hayne and deregulate the banking sector
It may seem paradoxical – even insane in polite society. But with a surge of new technologies emerging, which could…
Cubbie Station is a scapegoat
Cubbie Station cops the blame for all of the problems of the Darling River, particularly by green journalists, politicians, and…
What’s woke this week?
Super Bowl has been the biggest woke show in town, with a number of performers declining to perform at the…
The man the Left fears most
The seat of Warringah, on Sydney’s northern beaches, has never been marginal and has always been held for the conservative…
Aux bien pensants
After the dry comes the wet ‘Remember, after the big dry comes the big wet,’ presciently warned salt-of-the-earth South Australian…
Secularism – the new firebrand religion
The Australian Senate is currently considering a bill sponsored by the ALP’s Senator Wong that, if accepted, will amend the…
Fall of the House of Adler
‘Look here, what’s this book on my desk about Al Capone?’ ‘Why, Vice-Chancellor, it’s one of our flagship publications from…
Ramsay versus the Kaiser
Politically active people don’t see eye-to-eye on many issues these days, but something they all seem to agree on is…
Business/Robbery etc
Who needs parliament to make laws when there are clever judges who reckon they can do a far better job…
The Lion, the Witch & the Closet
With impeccable timing, increasingly-eccentric Defence Minister Christopher Pyne this week leapt out of some bizarre theological closet to declare that…
Selling virtue
Mining giants BHP and Rio Tinto have become the first major companies to publicly support the Uluru Statement from the…
Gerald Murnane
I know I’m a bit late getting to the party; the party that has formed to honour the writing of…
Paul Dyer
In 1721, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) made a rather grand job application to Christian Ludwig, the Margrave of Brandenburg. He…
Best production The Harp in the South
We are in the middle of the awards season for the entertainment industry. There have been the Golden Globes and…
Portrait of Leonard French by Hal Missingham
Arguably the most monumental of Australian artists, Leonard French experienced extraordinary fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some…
John Ruskin: the making of a modern prophet
At the time of his death in 1900, John Ruskin was, according to Andrew Hill, ‘perhaps the most famous living…
How fear and loathing of Nixon sent Hunter S. Thompson crazy
Hunter Stockton Thompson blazed across the republic of American arts and letters for too short a time. When in February…
Seeing and believing: the best spiritual films of Europe’s golden age
The Italian film director Federico Fellini was not known for his piety (far from it), yet towards the end of…
The unearthly powers of the North Pole
Having spent too much of my life at both poles (writing, not sledge-pulling), I know the spells those places cast.…
Fiction for the #MeToo age: Victory, by James Lasdun, reviewed
James Lasdun is my favourite ‘should be famous’ writer, his work extraordinarily taut and compelling. His eye-boggling psychological thrillers are…
The powerful magnetism of James Clerk Maxwell
Chances are, you are reading these words in some room or other. Build a wall down the middle of it,…
Hitting the bull’s-eye: Hark, by Sam Lipsyte, reviewed
This is an ebullient, irreverent and deeply serious novel in the noble tradition of Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis (especially Babbitt…
No escape from grief: Where Reasons End, by Yiyun Li, reviewed
When Yiyun Li first became a writer, she decided that she would leave behind her native language, Chinese, and never…
The brutish origins of British liberalism
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the one to heaven may be surfaced with bad ones.…
Fun at the EU’s expense: The Capital, by Robert Menasse, reviewed
Stendhal likened politics in literature to a pistol-shot in a concert: crude, but compelling. When that politics largely consists of…
Fishing for meaning in vanished Doggerland
Somewhere deep in the water-thick layers of Time Song, Julia Blackburn says, funnily, that in Danish, ‘the word for book…
An island’s dark secrets: The Tempest, by Steve Sem-Sandberg, reviewed
‘I should not have gone back to the island but I did it all the same.’ So begins the Swedish…