Books
Having a moral compass just gets in the way of being smart
Steven D. Levitt was a Harvard economist who specialised in politics and spent a lot of time watching cop shows…
The gentle intoxications of Laurie Lee
On Laurie Lee’s centenary, Jeremy Treglown wonders how the writer’s legacy stands up
Spoken For
What I want to tell you is I can dream with my eyes wide open, like riding a bicycle without…
J.K. Rowling is just too nice – and too lucky – to satirise publishing
J.K. Rowling’s second novel under the Robert Galbraith moniker is a whodunit set in the publishing industry. This isn’t a…
Books and arts
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Labor renewal?
Ben Chifley once spoke about a shining light on the hill. By the time that Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard…
Extreme poetic licence
He was always lucky, and he knew it: lucky in the secure rural intimacy of the upbringing described in Cider…
Spoken For
What I want to tell you is I can dream with my eyes wide open, like riding a bicycle without…
Extreme poetic licence
He was always lucky, and he knew it: lucky in the secure rural intimacy of the upbringing described in Cider…
Spoken For
What I want to tell you is I can dream with my eyes wide open, like riding a bicycle without…
You know something’s up when MI6 moves its head office to Croydon
Alan Judd’s spy novels occupy a class of their own in the murky world of espionage fiction, partly because they…
The Australian literary icon who fooled her family
There aren’t many places you can get shouty about Proust without losing your job. The Lane Bookshop in Perth, Western…
No special pleading needed for this disabled Dutch master
To discover an ‘unknown’ is the dream of anyone connected with the arts and in Johannes Thopas (c.1626-1688/95) we have…
The punk who inspired a generation of British woman to pick up a guitar
Viv Albertine is deservedly famous as the guitarist of the tumultuous, all-female English punk band The Slits. Their debut album,…
An old soldier sees through the smoke of Waterloo
David Crane on an old soldier’s account of a 200-year-old battle that will never fade away
Hillary Clinton’s autobiography seems destined to join her husband’s - in a bin marked ‘Free’
Last year a Washington-based journalist called Mark Leibovich wrote This Town, a book whose thesis was, roughly, that Washington-based journalists…
Stephen King – return of the great storyteller
Stephen King’s latest novel, Mr Mercedes, is dedicated to James M. Cain and described as ‘a riveting suspense thriller’ —…
Ice Sculpture
If I begged you to, would you hitchhike to the ice-sculpture factory, where the drunken cow was just presented, and…
The man who loathed emoticons - especially :)) as it reminded him of his double chin
Paul O’Rourke, the narrator of Joshua Ferris’s third novel, is a dentist who spends his days staring into the murky…
The Spanish Civil War hotel that Capa, Hemingway and Gelhorn called home
In February 1924 the Hotel Florida, a ten- storey marble-clad building with 200 rooms, a glass-roofed atrium and red plush…
Recipe for a modern baker: first, move to Hoxton
If I were the kind of person who invited people to come and have a bite to eat that very…
The breasts that launched Les Fleurs du Mal
This novel is based on the life of Charles Baudelaire and the relationship he enjoyed — or endured — with…
When Geoff Boycott was a DJ in a Sydney nightclub
Sport isn’t about putting a ball into a net or over a bar or into a hole. It’s about the…
Those weren't the days
If you wanted a brief epigraph for Linda Grant’s recent fiction, then five words from Dorothy Parker might well do…
Books and arts
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