Reinventing energy policy
While the Liberal party tears itself apart over whether a Clean Energy Target as proposed by the Finkel report delivered…
True Islam
Each new Islamic terrorist atrocity is denounced by western leaders such as our Prime Minister as a ‘twisted’ or ‘perverted’…
Men of violence
Almost every other Aboriginal woman I know has been subject to family violence. It is in fact rare for an…
Reinventing energy policy
While the Liberal party tears itself apart over whether a Clean Energy Target as proposed by the Finkel report delivered…
Thou shalt not steal the truth
On 11 May 2017, under the auspices of Dialogue4Peace, I, together with Egyptian Copt, Nadia Ghali, were the main speakers…
Time bandits
‘Oooooo,’ coos the middle-aged box office lady with a wink, as I pick up my tickets to the World Science…
So it’s all about the, er, settlements then?
There has long been a conventional wisdom in some foreign policy circles that runs like this: solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict…
Excuse me, your cognitive dissonance is showing
On June 5 in Brighton, Melbourne, at a spot I have driven past countless times, there was a terrorist incident.…
Business/Robbery etc
The foxes have already been let into the henhouse. Led by the nastiest fox of all, the thuggish, serial law-breaker…
Andrew Nicholl A distant view of Derry through a bank of wild flowers
Last week came the welcome announcement of the State Government’s funding of the major extension, indeed doubling, of the exhibition…
Tom Conroy as Winston Smith
‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ That is the arresting opening line…
A N Wilson and Resolution
A sold-out session at the Sydney Writers’ Festival was an indication of public interest in the writer, A. N. Wilson,…
Jun Chen Grey Red 2017
At the age of 30, Jun Chen arrived in Australia post Tianamen Square. He settled in Brisbane where his first…
The turf
Back on the political beat with CNN for the general election, I was reminded how politics is now dominated by…
High life
A famous epigrammatic nugget of wisdom appears in The Leopard, Lampedusa’s great novel about a noble Sicilian family’s fortunes: ‘If…
Low life
‘Yours?’ I said to the woman watching the mechanic poring over the latest-shape Renault Mégane for faults. (I was waiting…
Real life
All had gone suspiciously quiet down our little track on the village green, and we had begun to think we…
Pakistan and the power of redemption
The Pakistan supporter was festooned in cream and green, and carried a chalkboard round his neck with the legend: ‘My…
Panic of the playwrights
Earlier this week the Guardian launched ‘Brexit Shorts’, a series of monologues written by Britain’s ‘leading playwrights’ about the aftermath…
Verse and worse
Molly Brodak, a fair, young Polish-American born in Michigan, is a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Iowa: that hotbed…
The disgrace of the British left
Giles Udy did not start out with the intention of writing this book. He was in Russia about 15 years…
Blood and bling
There must be any number of self-respecting gemmologists out there on first-name terms with other diamonds, but for most of…
The evil that men do
Early one summer’s morning in 1994, Paul Jennings Hill, a defrocked Presbyterian minister, gunned down a doctor, John Britton, as…
Do we give a hoot?
‘There is room for a very interesting work,’ Gibbon observed in a footnote, ‘which should lay open the connection between…
She-devils on horseback
Rumour will run wild about a society of warrior women, somehow free from the world of men. We all feel…
Another gone girl
Adam Thorpe’s latest novel, Missing Fay, examines the lives of a disparate group of people in Lincolnshire, all touched in…
Borne back ceaselessly into the past
‘I do not like the idea of the biographical book,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald told his editor Max Perkins in 1936.…
Patience on a monument
As a food writer Patience Gray (1917–2005) merits shelf-space with M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson. Fleeing from the…
The greatest survival story
This is the story of a 16th-century Portuguese knight and mariner who survived alone on a lump of volcanic rock…
A policeman’s lot
Described by the publisher as a ‘moving and personal account of what it is to be a police officer today’,…
A barren prospect
In many ways this is a very old-fashioned novel. Jerome is 53, and a lacklustre professor at Columbia; his wife,…