V. Namatjira Stand strong for who you are
It is a name deeply imbedded in Australia’s cultural memory. Albert Namatjira’s (1902-1957) was a prolific and immensely popular watercolour…
Aussie Life
It is the season of hyperbole. Conservative columnists are finding parallels for Dan Andrews’ pandemic policy in Mao’s Great Leap…
Kiwi Life
It’s true what they say about ill winds. The coronavirus pandemic was a perverse blessing for New Zealand Prime Minister…
Life and fate
The season of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads continues at the Bridge. In The Hand of God we meet Celia, a…
Why Boris has his hopes pinned on spring
In a non-Covid world, next week would be the Tory party conference. Boris Johnson would march on to the stage…
Opposites attract
Babysitters are having a literary moment. Following Kiley Reid’s debut Such a Fun Age, Nick Hornby is the latest author…
A.G. Cook: Apple
Grade: A The future, then. The sound of pop eating itself, throwing up into a bag and then getting a…
It isn’t always easy to give money away
I always felt sorry for my father, then president of a chronically strapped educational institution, for having ceaselessly to approach…
Signal boxes
Petersfield signal box is in the wrong place. Or at least it is now. When it was built in the…
This dead-bat business minister should plead to be reshuffled
What advice can I offer Alok Sharma, who took a pasting in the weekend press for his lacklustre performance as…
Bloodbath in Rome
It’s not as if Julius Caesar wasn’t warned about the Ides of March. Somebody thrust a written prediction of the…
Formal, but fluid
When Romeo and Juliet first meet at a party, their words to one another fall into the form of a…
Other men’s wars
‘That was how that part of the world was at the time. Every bit of it belonged to Europeans, at…
A world apart
Plexiglass bubbles hover over diners’ heads in restaurants. Plastic pods, spaced six feet apart, separate weightlifters in gyms. Partitions of…
A meditation on love
The scrawny little girl with ‘pipe-cleaner legs’ wants to feel at home with her parents. But father and mother live…
Worlds of their own
Holiday islands, desert islands, love islands, islands of eternal youth, siren islands, islands filled with screaming demons. Of all the…
Portrait of the week
Home More than a quarter of the population of the United Kingdom (three-fifths of the Welsh, a third of the…
Too clever by half
Organs of the press are filled with opinion pages. The sublime confidence about Covid with which commentators advance these opinions,…
Diary
I have been in Istanbul, partly to research a French-born collateral ancestor of mine, Aimée Dubucq, who, according to legend,…
Barometer
Word for word US presidential debates are often traced back to the first televised debate, between Richard Nixon and John…
Letters
Lessons for the government Sir: James Forsyth suggests that the Prime Minister wishes to avoid sounding as if he is…
Lockdown fatigue
From the vantage point of Downing Street, Boris Johnson may feel reassured that the further measures against Covid-19 he imposed…
An ‘unremarkable’ Nazi
In October 2011 Daniel Lee was at a dinner party at which a Dutch woman told a disturbing story. It…
