Wild life
Kenya At Nairobi’s Muthaiga Club this week I bumped into Stanley Johnson, author of the superb memoir Stanley, I Presume…
Bookends: Dickensian byways
Is there room for yet another book on Dickens? Probably not, but we’ll have it anyway. The Dickens Dictionary (Icon,…
Latham’s law
Later this year, Labor’s new leader (either Stephen Smith or Bill Shorten) will have a strategic decision to make: what…
Bookends: A network of kidney-nappers
Raylan Givens, an ace detective in the Raymond Chandler mould, has encountered just about every shakedown artist and palooka in…
Latham’s Law
One of the delusions of the nanny state is that laws made in the distant chambers of Parliament House can…
Star turn
At first sight, the new Royal Ballet double bill might come across as an odd coupling: Ashton’s sparkling The Dream…
Bookends: Short and sweet
Before texts and Twitter there were postcards. Less hi-tech, but they kept people in touch. Angela Carter (pictured above) and…
Latham’s Law
The wonder of the Tent Embassy riot lies not in how or why it happened, but in the political judgement…
Bookends: Trouble and strife
It isn’t true that Joanna Trollope (pictured above) only produces novels about the kind of people who have an Aga…
Room with a view
Living Architecture is a new social enterprise that adds a touch of glamour to the traditional British holiday. Instead of…
Wild life
Wau, South Sudan ‘Let’s visit the brewery,’ said Ken when we reached Wau. We were dusty and parched. It was…
Room with a view
Living Architecture is a new social enterprise that adds a touch of glamour to the traditional British holiday. Instead of…
Latham’s Law
Saturday morning at the nearest coffee shop, marvelling at the power of Murdoch self-promotion. One paper presents a profile of…
Bookends: Doors of perception
Unlike most of the old rockers he writes about, the esteemed US critic Greil Marcus is becoming more prolific as…
Bookends: The year of living dangerously
Most people who recall 1976 do so for its appallingly hot summer, when parks turned brown and roads melted. Some…
Latham’s law
December was a bad month for the Kim family. First Kim Il-Carr was dumped from Julia Gillard’s cabinet. Then Kim…
Bookends: A shaggy beast of a book
Autobiography is a tricky genre to get right, which may be why so many well-known people keep having another go…
Latham’s law
In the pages of this magazine and elsewhere, the British neolibertarian Brendan O’Neill has mounted a curious argument about media…
Bookends: An unreal world
Even by Hollywood standards, Carrie Fisher is pretty crazy. She was born a Hollywood princess, and remembers her parents —…
Latham’s law
On one of his visits to Australia, Bill Clinton confessed to former NSW Premier Bob Carr that ‘Some people in…
Bookends: A metropolitan menagerie
London has always loved its animals. James I kept elephants in St James’s Park (allowed a gallon of wine per…
Latham’s law
Lost in the hub-hub of Labor’s National Conference was an election result which lays bare the true state of Australia’s…
Bookends: Saving JFK
Stephen King’s latest novel is a time-travel fantasy about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At almost 750 pages, 11.22.63…
Wild life
Kenya In protest against the lack of law and order in my farming district I have decided to dye my…
Saved by the Bel
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s and Jérôme Bel’s 3Abschied is the latest addition to a long and historically well-established series of…
