Bookends: Tilling tales
Several years ago, I listed as my literary heroes Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations and E. F. Benson’s Lucia. The…
Latham’s law
There is a story, apocryphal perhaps, about the meeting between John F. Kennedy and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in…
Bookends: Disarming but disingenuous
At first glance, Be the Worst You Can Be (Booth-Clibborn Editions, £9.99) by Charles Saatchi (pictured above with his wife,…
Latham’s law
A common lament in political commentary is how parliamentary life has changed beyond recognition. The end of Cold War ideology…
Latham’s law
No one could accuse the Queensland Labor Party of over-intellectualising its political tactics. At a time when academics and commentators…
Wild life
I looked at the bomb craters and their shrapnel blast patterns. Dozens of metres away, rocks and tree trunks were…
Bookends: Terribly Tudor
History publishers like a gimmick, so I assumed Suzannah Lipscomb’s A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England (Ebury, £12.99) must be…
Triple triumph
Not many ballet companies convey young love as credibly as Birmingham Royal Ballet. And I am not talking about select…
Bookends: A matter of opinion
In an age when the merely mildly curious believe they can get all they really need to know from Wikipedia…
Latham’s law
Some of the new television programming for 2012 has been hard to follow. Last Sunday, for instance, I tuned into…
Succulent pleasures
It was about time a dance-maker exacted revenge on dance academics. In Alexander Ekman’s 2010 Cacti, a voiceover explains the…
Bookends: A life of gay abandon
Sometimes, only the purest smut will do. Scotty Bowers’s memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex…
Latham’s law
One of the mighty tales of American politics concerns the populist, Depression-era Governor of Louisiana, Huey Long. Campaigning for office,…
Bookends: Down on the farm
Can we please have an inquiry into why already talented people are allowed to go off and be brilliant at…
Latham’s law
The Gillard-Rudd struggle is not just about party politics. It is also about media politics. At the Sydney Morning Herald,…
On the ropes
‘Aerial’ ballets were all the rage in late-Victorian London. It mattered little that they were more circus acts than actual…
Bookends: Wasp without a sting
‘It may be hard to accept that a chaste teenage girl can end up in bed with the President of…
Latham’s Law
Kevin Rudd’s resignation as Foreign Minister is consistent with every other scene in this Rudd-inspired soap opera. The man who…
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…
