Versatility and Virtuosity
It’s a strange business to be looking at some of the big books that press for attention at this time of year. A historical thriller about the pursuit of the regicides of Charles I by Robert Harris, a man who has written thrillers about the great Roman orator Cicero, about algorithms and Munich, about the Dreyfus affair and the Lord knows what. Then in a different category, there is the new novel by Kamila Shamsie, the London-based Pakistani-born novelist who is followed by multitudes but who is only incidentally a popular novelist. Her last novel, Home Fire, reviewed in Quadrant, was a masterpiece: a re-enactment of the Antigone myth so swift and so idiomatic—dead boy implicated in ISIS, Muslim Home Secretary, blindingly righteous girl—that it sweeps the reader trained in this sort of thing along so compellingly that by the time he recognises the prototype Sophocles and Hegelian dialectic have become footnotes to the novel.
Then, like nothing on earth, there are the two…
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