Travel diary
If you have never been to Helsinki, put it on your bucket list. But, go twice. Once in summer for…
From me to you
In Competition No. 3014 you were invited to submit a love poem written by one contemporary politician to another. …
Dear Mary
Q. Some rather flashy new neighbours of ours — I won’t mention their names as his will be familiar to…
Go ballistic
I had always thought that to go ballistic was the same as to go nuclear, metaphorically. But the ballistic figure…
Australian letters
Odious Sir: It is typical of the sloppy zealotry of your Australian edition, which is so at odds with the…
Thank Evans for good wine
There was an entirely forgotten leftist called Allen Ginsberg, a so-called beat poet (surely an oxymoron) who once produced a…
Descent into hell
It’s awful, but the surname Rausing (once synonymous only with the Tetrapak fortune) now summons up a terrible stench in…
Crusading passions
In W.B. Yeats’s ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, a testing allusion emerges amid a scene of nightmare: Monstrous familiar…
Beyond Timbuktu
Every so often a monster comes along. Here’s one — but a monster of fact not fiction, over 700 pages…
A blast from the past
If you had to choose one book that both typified spy fiction and celebrated what the genre was capable of…
The magic of maths
It’s odd, when you think about it, that mathematics ever got going. We have no innate genius for numbers. Drop…
Creature comforts
As naturalist, educator and writer, John Lister-Kaye was for many years a voice in the wilderness. In 1976, when nature…
Homer Simpson meets Homer
Milan Kundera has said that Homer’s Odyssey was the first novel. I’m not so sure — the verse kind of…
Ill-met by gaslight
What is it about Victorian murders that so grips us? The enduring fascination of Jack the Ripper caught the imagination…
Pleasure palaces and hidden gems
Theatre buildings are seriously interesting – as I ought to have appreciated sooner in the course of 25 years writing…
Punks vs. Putin
What makes for meaningful political protest? In regimes where ideology was taken seriously (such as the Soviet Union or America…
Armageddon averted
From 1945 to 1992 the Cold War was the climate. Individual weather events stood out — the Korean War, the…
Stan Grant’s papal bull
According to ancient legend, Alexander the Great was born on the day that the second Temple of Artemis at Ephesus…
Don’t change the Senate
Defenders of the constitution have our work cut out for us. It seems that every day brings a new, novel,…
Coming soon to a campus near you
If you are not worried about the state of free enquiry in universities around the Anglosphere then you are probably…
Business/Robbery etc
Why are so many company directors diverting their energies into pushing publicly-owned corporations to take up controversial social and political…
Cry me a river
My local council – Yarra City – is a grab-bag of inner-urban ‘brie and chablis’ lefties from central casting. It…
Aux bien pensants
Everything and anything to bring Australia down Will our elites succeed in bringing Australia down, just as Argentina and especially…
Where’s Waleed (on gay marriage)?
When the Chinese family who have a café in the small town near me put a sign in their window…
Diary
September is my time of year. Summer is all very well if you’re one of those golden-haired, long-limbed types who…
