Finally tired of London
Iain Sinclair is leaving London — like the croakiest of the ravens taking flight from the Tower. It is a…
Mozart’s mischievous muse
If you were to compare Mozart to a bird it wouldn’t be the starling. Possibly the wood thrush or nightingale,…
Stage fright
Patrick McGrath is a master of novels about post-traumatic fragmentation and dissolution, set amid gothic gloom. His childhood years spent…
The writer behind the brand
Few publishing phenomena in recent years have been as gratifying as Chris Kraus’s cult 1997 masterpiece I Love Dick becoming…
A flawed and dangerous theory
If there were a prize awarded to the book with the best opening line, A. N. Wilson would be clearing…
The art of the arabesque
The title of this book, By the Pen and What They Write, is a quotation from the Qur’an and comes…
City of dreadful dusk
Fantastic fiction loves contrasts made explicit: Eloi and Morlocks, orcs and elves, and above all humans battling vampires, Martians or…
Mysticism and metamorphosis
‘I frankly hate Descartes,’ states a character in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Forest Dark: ‘The more he talks about following…
The last great adventure
Towards the end of his life, Robert Louis Stevenson travelled widely in the central and southern Pacific Ocean. As well…
A grand inquisitor
Hidden behind Kensington Palace, in one of London’s smartest streets, there is a grand old house which played a leading…
A clash of loyalties
If someone was to lob the name Antigone about, many of us would smile and nod while trying to remember…
The fruits of imperialism
Imagine yourself a middle-class person in England in the 1870s. You sit down to drink a cup of tea while…
Bacteria
It’s like whipping cream. All of a sudden it goes stiff and you can turn the bowl upside down without…
Call Barnier’s bluff
There is a growing perception that Britain is floundering in its EU negotiations, with a professional team from Brussels running…
Australian letters
What’s the question? Sir: Will the wording of the postal plebiscite be set to harvest a ‘Yes’ vote to distort…
Bottom drawer
Deep in the bowels of the Australian Safe Schools Supporters (ASSS) headquarters, a planning session was taking place. All those…
to 2322: In memoriam
The event was THE GLORIOUS TWELFTH (1D/29) (12 August, opening day of the grouse-shooting season). Remaining unclued lights bring to…
Heroes of Hyde Park
Captain Cook and Lachlan Macquarie are being hunted down by didactic leftists. Last Friday one of these ‘correctors’ of history…
#Hug a Nazi?
When the Nazi knifepoint was at Britain’s jugular in 1940 Winston Churchill told the nation that all it could look…
Apology unaccepted
It was 18 years ago last weekend that then-PM John Howard moved a Motion of Reconciliation, including an expression of…
Silence of the Lams
Last month Hong Kong celebrated the twentieth anniversary of its 1997 handover. In those far-off days many Hong Kongers felt…
Lack of same sex protection
The (thankfully) former president of the Australian Human Rights Commission Gillian Triggs suggested recently that the same-sex marriage debate was…
The roaring ‘silence’
The notion of a ‘Great Australian Silence’ about Australian history and the treatment of indigenous people might have been accurate…
Marion Hall Best in Marimekko, 1968
Her shop was one of the glories of Rowe Street, itself one of the glories of old Sydney, before it…
