Portrait of the week
Home Sir John Major, the former prime minister, made a speech at Chatham House in which he called the referendum…
La la Libs
The commentariat are almost unanimous that Tony Abbott should not have launched our book Making Australia Right: Where to From…
Israel’s enemies
Benjamin Netanyahu’s historic visit to Australia, the first by an Israeli prime minister, has brought on to the streets the…
One Nation’s chief recruiter
Most of the media just don’t ‘get’ Tony Abbott. They think he’s critical of Malcolm Turnbull because he wants his…
Israel, Terra nullius?
The visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given journalists and ex-politicians a handy platform. There has been a…
Islam’s women
The recent debate stirred by claims that Islam is the most feminist religion (Q&A Feb 13, 2017) and Islamic law…
From page to stage
Reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet is a heady experience. You not only see, hear, know her characters — you can…
Parting shots
Gurinder Chadha’s modern comedies have fun with cultural divides. Girls kick footballs in Bend It Like Beckham. A gaggle of…
Snap happy
These days the world is experiencing an unprecedented overload of photographs, a global glut of pictures. More and more are…
Sound storms
Nothing pleased Iannis Xenakis more than a great big rattling storm. The sound of a thunderclap would have him running…
Statue-esque
Why set a supremely great play to music? The Winter’s Tale, the play of Shakespeare’s that I love most, has…
All in the mind
At the third UK International Radio Drama Festival held last week in Herne Bay, entitled ‘And Let Us Listen to…
The terrible truth
Here’s the bad news. One day you or someone like you will be shopping in a mall or enjoying a…
All that jazz
It’s every impresario’s dream. Buy a little off-West End venue to try out stuff for fun. Andrew Lloyd Webber has…
Australian notes
‘Malcolm Turnbull is Jewish.’ This was one of the newer Palestinian banners held high at the anti-Israel, anti-Netanyahu rally…
Alison Whyte and Colin Friels
When I was at secondary school in the 1950s, we were taught about the significance of the 20th century’s Irish…
Simon Collins
As a man without a faithful atom in his body I am fascinated by the phenomenon of radicalisation; the alchemical…
Dis-con notes
The next abbott ministry (part ii) On November 19 (‘Dis-Con Notes: The Next Abbott Ministry’) I canvassed prerequisites for the…
US talk circuit
Hating trump The talk circuit has started up again in Manhattan, and the good news is that, unusually, Australia featured…
18Cowards
Think back to November of last year. It had become widely realised by the public that the so-called hate speech…
Short – but far from sweet
Like his Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, The Sympathisers, the stories in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees are set largely among…
Who will guard the guards?
The history of an army is essentially the history of its deeds. The history of an army within an army…
Undone by love
On the Whitsun weekend of 1935 an art student called Denton Welch was knocked off his bicycle by a car…
It’s in the memes
The greatest of Bach’s 224 cantatas is BWV 109, ‘Ich glaube, lieber Herr, hilf meinem Unglauben’. Its subject — the…
