In 2004, following Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, foreign minister Silvan Shalom said the only question was why it had not happened...
Clem Christesen, the founding Meanjin editor who ran the magazine for thirty-four years, once said that “culture is the permanent part of a nation.” It was...
Let me start with a couple of incidents that illustrate the great political puzzle we now face. Incident 1: On Thursday a number of tech billionaires...
About a third of the way into John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs — a book that sets Lennon and McCartney’s platonic love affair...
About a third of the way into John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs — a book that sets Lennon and McCartney’s platonic love affair...
Spike Lee’s new film is a tale of a legendary music mogul, a high-wire business deal, a kidnapping, a ransom demand for $17.5 million in Swiss...
After a couple of weeks in Washington DC, my rueful report is that Trumpworld is even stranger close up. Arriving after the president ordered the army...
A writer friend recently asked if I ever felt lonely. She confessed to being puzzled by the idea: her problem was an excess of people, with...
The eightieth anniversary of the end of the second world war has passed with little fanfare in much of Australia. In the Melbourne suburb of Oakleigh,...
Last night two of my closest friends and I bade each other goodnight in our traditional style: a hug, an exclamatory “darling” and a whispered, emphatic,...