Paradise or prison?
This daintily dress-conscious and rewardingly heavyweight novel is set mainly in a half imaginary stately home in Oxfordshire. The story…
Soaring and singing
Whether it’s Coleridge’s nightingale or Petrarch’s, Ted Hughes’s wren or Shelley’s skylark, Helen Macdonald’s hawk or Max Porter’s crow, literature…
High life
At a chic dinner party last week, a Trump insider gossiped about an American president having had an affair with…
Budget notes
Stealing Shorten’s shorts In 1845 Benjamin Disraeli said of Britain’s Tory Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, that he had ‘caught…
Identity politics
The budget week just gone has marked the moment when both sides of politics officially gave up on budget repair…
Worth losing the base?
Donald Trump has identified a phenomenon in the Western media which many suspect and which believers in a free press…
Business/Robbery etc
It’s one of the few bits of Liberal economic policy left in the budget – and judging by the pathetic…
Turnbull’s twilight urgatory
‘I Told You So!’. These are not words that listeners usually enjoy hearing. In fact, if you’re looking for a…
Snowflake warriors
Australia’s hopes rest in its youth, or so people used to say in the expectation that rising generations would build…
Low life
Chez Frank is a popular local boar-hunters’ bar, tobacconist and general store at a lonely crossroads in the forest. It…
Anniversary
‘It’s like Pin number,’ said my husband, drifting into lucidity. So it is, in a way. The construction under discussion…
Real life
The builder boyfriend has dug himself a hole. I don’t mean he’s in trouble with me. I mean he has…
Stupid is as stupid votes
John Stuart Mill is usually credited as the person who first called the Conservatives ‘the stupid party’, but that isn’t…
Why we need paper promises
When you get into a taxi, there’s usually a framed sheet of paper describing what you pay for your trip:…
Barometer
Veggie skills Forest Green Rovers, described as the world’s first vegan football club, was promoted to the Football League. Some…
A method to his madness
His cartoons were semi-serious responses to societal problems, as this extract from Adam Hart-Davis’s new book shows
EXCLUSIVE: Forgotten People speech draft discovered
On Monday, 22 May, Liberal party grandees, MPs and supporters will gather at a gala dinner in Canberra to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of…
One impact of the budget: sales of white flags are booming
Sales of white flags are going gangbusters, with the Coalition buying out supplies. It isn’t surprising, as they’ve found so…
Women shouldn’t breastfeed in parliament
We need to go back to the drawing board and clarify what “equality” stands for. It does not mean female…
The blunt, brutal truth about house prices
I feel for the Gen Y and the Millennials, I really do. I know that I often mock them for…
Fact: the patriarchy causes climate change
Climate change is caused by the patriarchy. That’s the view of feminist author and activist, Gloria Steinem. Asked about the…
Julia Gillard: because I’m worth it
Picture this: you were prime minister. You made friends and enemies. You left politics with plenty of money in the…
