Australian letters
Bankstown lefty Sir: Paul Keating’s political legacy was pretty good, but I have to scoff at his ‘world’s greatest treasurer’…
Portrait of the Week
Home John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, said he was ‘strongly opposed’ to an address being made…
Mr Trumble’s dumb deal
President Trump was right. It was a ‘dumb deal’, dumb for both Australia and the United States. First, it was…
The Cory revolution
It’s hard to imagine that, less than five years ago, Cory Bernardi was Tony Abbott’s parliamentary secretary. The role suited…
Hanging on the telephone
January 29, 2017 might be remembered by Australians and Americans as the day when the President of the United States,…
Women’s tennis is a joke
In the warm afterglow of the festival of tennis that was the Australian Open, and the glorious men’s final match…
The Jackal vote
I have argued before that New Zealand and Australia might combine their defence forces, providing New Zealand pulled its weight…
Business/Robbery etc
At last a rational solution to Australia’s government-generated economically-crazy job-destroying energy crisis? Or just more pie in the sky from…
Brief candle
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of PM…
Some like it hot
In the mid-6th century, legend has it, St Brendan set off from Ireland with a currach-load of monks on a…
Mother superior
Unlike with buses, you wait ages and ages for one fabulous film as framed by the older female perspective to…
Sunny delight
No Californian could have painted Hockney’s pools. No La-La Land artist, raised on sun and orange juice, would have done…
Drake’s progress
Those poor Canadian rappers. Hailing from a country with a functioning benefits system, sensible firearms restrictions and relatively harmonious race…
Age concern
Brahms didn’t always have a beard. The picture in the London Symphony Orchestra’s programme book showed him clean-shaven, and rightly.…
Losing the plot
Fully to enjoy Opera North’s new production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel you need to take a trinocular perspective on…
Rules of engagement
The BBC foreign correspondent Hugh Sykes was meant to be talking about how music has shaped his life with Sarah…
Impaired vision
With the Shannon Matthews story, it’s not easy to accentuate the positive — but BBC1’s The Moorside (Tuesday) is having…
Timeless and dated
Tennessee Williams’s breakthrough play is a portrait of his dysfunctional family. A young writer, Tom (Williams’s real name), lives with…
Inbuilt obsolescence
Once upon a time, Australian politics was known for its stability. Long periods of one party or another in office,…
Brown study
Until a few days ago I was planning to start this column with: ‘Have you noticed how the heat has…
James Cook items, Treasures Gallery, NLA, Canberra
If you missed the 100 Objects from the British Museum on display at the Museum of Australia, don’t despair, there…
Brexit notes
Things have changed Only Harrogate, York and Leeds voted Remain in the European Referendum in Yorkshire last year. This was…
Jumping ship
Talk of Cory Bernardi’s ‘betrayal’, or of him ‘ratting out’ on his colleagues, is disingenuous twaddle at best. As we…
Intimations of mortality
In Deaths of the Poets two living examples of the species, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, retail the closing…
Flights of fancy
Michael Chabon’s back. He’d never gone away, of course — more than a dozen books in all — but it’s…
