Sonic youth
Years ago, I asked Robert Plant what he felt about the world’s love of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. He said he…
Cumbersome muddle
Rupert Goold’s new show, Women, Beware the Devil, has great costumes, sumptuous sets and an intriguing chessboard stage like a…
I may destroy you
One day in October 1966 I came home from school and found a large man stripped to the waist, attacking…
I’ll never trust the Spanish again
Champions is an underdog sports movie starring Woody Harrelson as a baseball coach forced to take on a team with…
Sea fever
In March 1675 the Keeper of His Majesty’s Lodgings at Greenwich received an order for ‘Three pairs of shutters for…
The lore of the jungle
The Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum moves from São Paulo to ‘reforest’ herself in the Amazon, and slowly gains the trust of a wary, isolated tribal people
In the fascist grip
A French widower’s horror at his elder son’s involvement with the Front National grows ever deeper as violence escalates
Our man in Agra
After landing in Surat in 1615, Sir Thomas Roe was studiously ignored, and months passed before he was finally received by the Mughal emperor
Dukes of hazard
Whether it was from hurt, spite or genuine fascist sympathies, his surprise at his family’s response simply confirms his stupidity
The crimes of Aunt Suzy
When a midwife in Nagyrév started doling out arsenic in 1911, dozens more women followed suit, until the death toll became impossible to ignore
Pushing the boundaries
New York’s Atelier 17 became a creative hub in the 1940s, where émigré Surrealists shared ideas with artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell
Voyages into the unknown
A marine biologist attempts to explore a newly discovered mid-Atlantic trench, but finds its destructive power both attracts and repels all who approach it
A sister’s quest for justice
Ten women, on average, are killed there every day – and Cristina Rivera Garza’s investigation of her sister’s murder is met with the usual ‘silence of impunity’
Is this the end of travel writing?
Viv Groskop shares Sara Wheeler’s fears that modern sensibilities are fatally threatening a centuries-old genre
The Lineker row isn’t about free speech – it’s a moral coup
So the cancel-culture set believes in free speech now? What a turnaround. People who have spent the past decade turning…
Wall Street wants Kamala. So do Republicans
Texas showdown Democratic congressman Colin Allred is mulling a run against Senator Ted Cruz, Cockburn has learned. No major Democratic…
Alan Jones: the inescapable truth of the energy crisis
If politicians cared to move into the real world and listened, rather than lectured, they would understand the inescapable truth…
Woke rail networks want to save the planet, but they can’t look after their stations
I was born in Wahroonga. Attended school there. In the decades since, I have lived in and around the little…
The BBC’s nightmare hat-trick of blunders
Oh dear. It seems that the BBC press office has had a nightmare 24 hours, with not one but three…
Should white people atone for colonial sin?
It has recently been reported in the ABC that Nathan Maynard, a Tasmanian Aboriginal artist, is seeking the body of…
Sweden, Covid and ‘excess deaths’: a look at the data
Pandemics kill people in two ways, said Chris Whitty at the start of the Covid outbreak: directly and indirectly, via…
Victimhood: the inversion of evolution by social stealth
There’s an old saying: It’s not what happens to you that matters, it’s what you do about what happens that matters.…
Gary Lineker taken off Match of the Day
Talk about an own goal. It seems that Gary Lineker’s increasingly aggressive anti-Tory tweets have got the multimillionaire into hot…
GOP seeks answers from NBA over Chinese soft power display
House and Senate Republicans, along with a basketball star, are demanding answers from the NBA about its financial relationship with…
