From first to last
As the dreaded season of goodwill approaches, the Royal Opera has mounted two revivals of pieces that are interestingly contrasted:…
Snowflakes in the workplace
Last week I was asked to give a talk about generation snowflake. This was at a breakfast organised by a…
On the road
‘We’re going to get lots of negative attention from environmentalists,’ he cackled, great puffs of blue-grey smoke emerging from the…
Closing credits
BBC1’s The Missing has been one of the undoubted TV highlights of 2016. Yet, even thrillers as overwhelmingly thrilling as…
Media notes
Mate, I tell ya. Jim-friggin’-Allan. No one else’s writing quite has the power to make me physically sick. His piece…
Your ABCC
It has taken quite a while indeed, but the Australian Building and Construction Commission Bill finally is passing into law.…
Scandals that make you switch off
Do any of us honestly have any idea how serious the Hillary Clinton email scandal was? I haven’t got a…
Of ice and men
An ice floe. Two anglers. Months to kill. That’s the premise of Nice Fish by Mark Rylance and Louis Jenkins.…
Up Close and Personal
Chris Mitchell’s memoir of his life as a News Ltd journalist, then as editor, first of Brisbane’s Courier Mail and…
Aristophanes on Trump
As self-important comics fantasise about unseating Donald Trump with their wit, they should remember the great Aristophanes. In 424 BC,…
Diary
It is odd when someone you know becomes a world-famous Nazi. You may not recognise the name Richard Spencer, but…
Food on the home front
From ‘The food shortage and how to meet it’, The Spectator, 2 December 1916: A rise in prices, if properly understood…
Portrait of the week
Home Paul Nuttall, aged 39, was elected leader of the UK Independence Party. He said: ‘I want to replace the Labour…
Barometer
Autumn Budgets Philip Hammond announced that in future the Budget will be held in autumn rather than spring. This is…
Our grandads didn’t die for this
It is, perhaps, a poor reflection of our times when a historian feels compelled to remind others that the Nazis…
Playing the identity card
‘And the union people crawled away…’- Billy Joel, Allentown ‘Funny that Billy just endorsed Hillary. He must have forgotten…
Business/Robbery etc
‘Free beer for all the wharfies when the red revolution comes’ When Chris Corrigan’s 1998 stevedore revolution changed the…
Engineering Club Sensible
If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it is that the times are changing. When news of the…
Have a cigar
Whatever else may be said of the late Fidel Castro, he has one distinction no-one can take from him or…
The Dictator delusion
It was a warm tropical night in 1995 and Fidel Castro was playing the waiting game with Gareth Evans. The…
The libertarian case against abortion
It just goes to show what a topsy-turvy world we are living in where somebody who believes that life is…
Death by blasphemy
My primary school teacher used to swear by Jove to emphasise how impressed he was when one of his pupils…
We are a low taxing country?
I’m sure you were all up late on Wednesday night eagerly awaiting the publication of the latest OECD Revenue Statistics.…
A spittoon’s worth of bigots
We are all racists now. Noel Person tells us so. The “hard bigotry” of Quadrant conservatism has merged with the “soft bigotry” of the ABC. The two have met in “the common…
Derryn Hinch and the ABCC: Shame, shame, shame!
Malcolm Turnbull and Michaelia Cash have boasted that the long-awaited passage of the Government’s ABCC bills is a ‘fundamental economic…
