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Real Books
By the 1980s, bread had become so white and gutless that a “back to basics” reaction set in and suddenly real bread, with traditional goodies and properly baked, appeared. Similarly with beer, which had become so chemical and tasteless that a real beer movement, emphasising the taste of hops and malt, arose. Both ventures proved commercially successful. A similar thing has been happening with books. The publishing industry is now dominated by hastily thrown-together confections masquerading between covers as books—celebrity autobiographies, anthologies on everything, media spinoffs, sporting feats, over-hyped novels, and the endless varieties of gender studies theory. These books are often incestuous, feeding off each other in their own comforting bubble, with no new input and little contact with the deeper aspects of reality, which is what books were originally designed to satisfy. They play up to a public distracted by media sensation, as Saul Bellow noted in his book of…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins