Business/Robbery etc
It’s not just the money cost of Senator Hinch’s amateurish meddling with legislation like the Australian Building and Construction Commission,…
The humiliated intellectuals of the Left
The Booker Prize winning author Yann Martel wrote in The Life of Pi that reason was the fool’s gold of…
Aux bien pensants
Long before Trump & Brexit… President Trump’s landslide is just the beginning. Better than the sight of battalions of experts…
Dishlickers’ delight
‘The world has gone mad. Donald Trump is president of the United States and now Reverend Fred Nile is strolling…
Laughing at the devil
‘Prison did not touch me,’ declares Pussy Riot’s Maria ‘Masha’ Alyokhina, raising her eyebrows with a sardonic smirk. I am…
Back in the USSR
For much of 1517 Michelangelo Buonarroti was busy quarrying marble in the mountains near Carrara. From time to time, however,…
All bark and no bite
A Monster Calls is a fantasy drama about a young boy whose life is crap, basically. His mother is sick.…
Apocalypse now
Gerald Barry loved playing organ for Protestants as they allowed him a lie in. Then they found out he wasn’t…
Chance would be a fine thing
It’s been a turbulent year, and not just in the outside world. Inside radio, digital is changing not just when…
Weird and wonderful
As you’ve probably noticed, TV critics spend a lot of their time trying to identify which other programmes the one…
Deplorable entertainment
Buried Child is a typical Sam Shepard play. The main character, Dodge, is a brain-damaged alcoholic cripple stuck in a…
Brown study
Here at the Spectator Australia Electoral Reform Unit, we certainly had our hands full in 2016, what with Brexit, and…
Consider this…
Integration is backPeter Dutton has signalled that provisional migrants should be treated as temporary residents until they have ‘proven their…
Royal Opera House production of King Roger
Soon after the Norman Conquest of England (1066 and all that) Count Roger Hauteville of Normandy took control of Sicily.…
Beijing diary
Standing next to the large lobby Christmas tree in ‘Sunjoy Mansion’ where the Australian has its modest office in Beijing,…
Immigration notes
At last, we’ve found something worse than Islamists: Millennial Islamists. Abdul Razak Ali Artan, the Somali refugee who carried out…
Jerusalem diary
‘To know how the world goes without America, look at Aleppo’. That’s the kind of insight (from the head of…
Kettles and chooks
After 2016, one of the most lacklustre, uneventful and stagnant years in Australian political history, there is every reason to…
Put out more flags
Did you know that 190 out of 200 nations in the world have either red or blue on their flags?…
Whisper who dares
Stand aside, Homer. I doubt whether even the author of the Iliad could have matched Alexis Peri’s account of the…
A fresh start
Most of us lead lives of quiet desperation. So we’re told. Frits van Egters apparently leads a life more desperate…
Homage to Mad Madge
There has never previously, I believe, been a novel about Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, one of the 17th century’s…
A truly monstrous regiment
When George Omona first saw soldiers in the infamous Lord’s Resistance Army, he was amazed. The scary fighters who had…
Hitchcock’s favourite bird
‘The Birds is coming’ screamed the posters for Tippi Hedren’s only famous film. Well, the cats is coming in her…
Cuckoo in the nest
‘Light as a feather, free as a bird.’ Günter Grass starts this final volume of short prose, poetry and sketches…
