Trump: it’s not just the economy, stupid
So, it’s happened. Donald Trump is not only now being referred to by a sneering press pack as the ‘President…
Death in Dili
This week marks several significant anniversaries in the life of our youngish nation. November 11 resonates because it was the…
The Age hits peak moron
Ok, I know I’ve already declared The Age dead. It is. Its former readers are just waiting for Fairfax CEO…
Let’s shut out this angry, unrepresentative mob
If you’re aiming to refute the suggestion that you can’t comprehend the difference between mob rule and the rule of…
Can we trust the people? I’m no longer sure
The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States may have signalled the death of the closest thing…
Brief encounters
When Mozart was commissioned to write an opera for the coronation of Emperor Leopold II, he produced La clemenza di…
It’s time to consider the real Trump
For 18 months, Donald Trump was amazingly useful to British politicians. Whatever their party, he provided them with the most…
Country music
There was something unexpectedly moving about hearing not just one but several renditions of the somewhat naive and rose-tinted but…
Trump will be much, much better for Britain
The deplorables are rather wonderful people, aren’t they? Both here and in the United States. The people’s revolution continues apace,…
Crown jewels
Nairobi. February 1952. Laughing children brandishing sticks are driving an indignant bustle of ostriches up a rudimentary 1950s-Africa semi-bush runway…
Angry bird
Dynastic affairs and international relations were once a seamless continuum. Royal weddings accompanied peace treaties. An heirless realm was vulnerable…
Brown study
I have a terrible confession to make. No, it is not that I was a bully at school, or even…
Consider this…
Kill the Commission: free speech There is nothing that the Australian Human Rights Commission does that cannot be done by…
Sebastian Smee
His schooling was at St Peter’s College, Adelaide followed by the University of Sydney where he graduated with honours in…
Worse than Big Brother
The California novelist T.C. Boyle has often taken true stories and created alternative histories, from John Harvey Kellog and the…
No one turned a hair
The Benson family was one of the most extraordinary of Victorian England, and they certainly made sure that we have…
A very special relationship
You learn startling things about the long entanglement of the British with Spain on every page of Simon Courtauld’s absorbing…
Fine silks and fiery curries
Genial, erudite and companionable over most of its 760 pages, this stout Georgian brick of a neighbourhood history at length…
Weird and wonderful
The Un-Discovered Islands could not be more different in substance — though it is similar in style — to Malachy…
Between pony club and the altar
If you were to take a large dragnet and scoop up all the shoppers in the haberdashery department of Peter…
Figures in a landscape
Timothy Hyman’s remarkable new book makes the case for the relevance of figurative painting in the 20th century, a period…
Soldiers of the Queen
It’s not immediately obvious, but the silhouette on the dust jacket — soldiers advancing in single file, on foot (‘boots…
The milk of human kindness
One of David Cameron’s choices on Desert Island Discs, this book reminds us, was ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the…
Surreal parables
There is a common assumption that experimental writing — for want of a better term — is obscure, joyless and…
Books of the year
Craig Raine Philip Hancock’s pamphlet of poems Just Help Yourself (Smiths Knoll, £5): charming, authentic, trim reports from the…
