Australia
Our Country’s Good prizes the concerns of the actors over the audience
Australia, 1788. A transport ship arrives in Port Jackson (later Sydney harbour) carrying hundreds of convicts and a detachment of…
Think ‘migrant’ is an insult? ‘Refugee’ can be too
Al Jazeera, the Qatari broadcaster, is going to use refugee instead of migrant in its English output. ‘The umbrella term…
Why nothing in sport beats thrashing the Aussies at cricket
Why nothing in sport beats thrashing the Aussies at cricket
Australia’s amazing, exhausting sporting comebacks
I have never met an Aussie I didn’t like, but, crikey, their sporting indefatigability is exhausting. Don’t they ever give…
If a novel about failure fails, does that make it a success?
I must be an idiot for pointing out the failings of a novel that’s so screamingly, self-denouncingly about failure. Steve…
Without Gallipoli, we’d have no Page 3
Some years ago I paid a visit to the site of the Gallipoli landings because I was mildly obsessed with…
Gunboats are the humanitarian answer to Libya's refugee crisis
More than a thousand migrants have died attempting to get into Europe over the past week, including 900 who perished…
A Father’s Day tragedy: what exactly happened when a car plunged into a reservoir in Australia in 2005?
When Helen Garner, an award-winning Australian author, first saw the TV news images of the car being dragged out of…
International cricket must return to Pakistan (and my team went first)
In a tiny courtyard just off the teeming alleys of Lahore’s old town, a young Pakistani boy in a gleaming…
Barry Humphries’s diary: The bookshop ruined by Harry Potter
Do fish have loins? Last Tuesday, in a pretentious restaurant, I ordered a ‘loin of sea trout’. It looked just…
Kate Chisholm on what makes the BBC World Service so special
‘Don’t take it for granted,’ she warned. ‘It’s one of the few places where you can hear diverse voices, different…
The Etonian peer who became an assistant to a Mexican commie
The lefty hereditary peer has few equals as a figure of fun, in life or literature. The late Tony Benn…
The Inbetweeners 2 is as filthy as a teenage boy – and it's hilarious
The first Inbetweeners film made £45 million at the box office, and was such an unexpected smash there was always…
The Australian literary icon who fooled her family
There aren’t many places you can get shouty about Proust without losing your job. The Lane Bookshop in Perth, Western…
Warning: upspeak can wreck your career
Upspeak can damage your career prospects
Germaine Greer's mad, passionate quest to heal Australia
Like an old woman in a fairy story, Germaine Greer, now in her late seventies, has taken to lurking in…
It’s not just Kevin Pietersen. England needs a whole team of new heroes
Englishmen used to be deported to Australia as a punishment. Now they get sent back to England as an act…
Australia's entrancing Sheila
The ‘dollar princesses’, those American heiresses who crossed the Atlantic in search of a titled husband, are familiar figures from…
Breakdowns, suicide attempts — and four great novels
Among the clever young Australians who came over here in the 1960s to find themselves and make their mark, a…
Drink: The great white Burgundy disaster
We agreed that it was the gravest crisis facing mankind. It has led to dashed hopes, widespread grief and a…
Matthew Parris: The secret Australia - and why I love it
Nations seek their souls in the strangest places. We English, for instance, have illustrated ourselves to the world and to…
Charles Moore: Nelson has lost the battle to a fat, stupid blue cockerel
I do not know whether the Greek gypsy couple accused of abducting a girl called Maria are guilty, but I…
Note to the opposition: Tony Abbott is not to blame for the bushfires
Australia One of the odd things about bushfires as we know them in Australia is the unlikely truces declared between…
Is the best Australian art yet to come?
Astonishingly, the last major survey show of Australian art in this country was mounted more than half-a-century ago. Then it…
How Australia's Tony Abbott pulled off a great conservative victory
By conventional wisdom, Tony Abbott should not become Prime Minister of Australia this weekend. He ought to be too conservative,…
