Business/Robbery etc.
Bragging rights – and wrongs A significant intervention against free and private choice, based on the idea that government knows…
Dis-con notes
Reshuffle revisited On 5 July we learned that the Minister for Finance, Senator Mathias Cormann, will leave parliament towards the…
Victorian burglars
Spare a thought for Victorian burglars. Just when they thought they could go back to ransacking South Yarra mansions while…
Different words
If you’d been in our house during the Coon cheese debacle you would have heard me shouting at the TV:…
Aussie Life
Statue deconstruction is becoming the Anglosphere’s most popular artistic genre. So why are our local avant-garde artists lagging behind? Sculpture…
The Catholic church’s cowardly betrayal
Of all the sad and surreal things to happen in the past few months, the Catholic church’s decision to abandon…
Return of the patriarch
Some faint hearts may sink at the idea of a torrid Swedish family drama peopled with nameless figures identified only…
Can Boris avoid a winter lockdown?
As the government struggled on Saturday with the question of whether to impose a quarantine on those returning from Spain,…
Method in the madness
First there were the home recitals: musicians playing solo Bach in front of their bookshelves, wonkily captured on iPhones. Next…
Greatness and idiocy
Is the world ready for the return of live rock music? On the evidence of the first gig in London…
The Great Yarmouth Hippodrome
Guess which theatre is the first to open to the paying public post-Covid? Not Lloyd Webber’s London Palladium, where small…
Putting the boot in
Tim Parks is a seasoned, incisive observer of football, the railways, work, domestication and plenty more in his adoptive country…
Taylor Swift: Folklore
Grade: A- This is worrying — like listening to a speech by David Lammy and finding yourself, against your better…
Opulence and chaos
Nobody could argue that Andrew Davies isn’t up for a challenge. He’d also surely be a shoo-in for Monty Python’s…
The vulgarity of easy money: lessons from Malaysia’s mega-scandal
When I worked in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur long ago, my office looked across Jalan Tun Razak, a…
The past is a foreign country
In Russian, the proverb ‘Ignorance is bliss’ translates as ‘The less you know, the better you sleep’. For those who…
The scrapheap of life
All it takes to turn a cast-off into a prized possession can be a bit of imagination. To a passerby,…
The hurricane from hell
Home, as James Baldwin wrote, is perhaps ‘not a place but simply an irrevocable condition’. Sarah M. Broom’s National Book…
