Latest Articles
We are encouraged to rely more and more on government officials to do for us what we could equally well do for ourselves—and, maybe more importantly, not to do what might help us solve our own problems.
Sep 08 2024
10 mins
If we imagine a metric called the Pinocchio Scale, which measures the number of lies told by a politician as a percentage of his or her overall public statements, our current prime minister (for want of a better description), Airbus Albo, has moved well into uncharted territory.
Sep 06 2024
5 mins
The Gap Between Literature and Life
There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction
by Saul Bellow
Viking, 2015, 532 pages, $43.50
Authors like Les Murray and David Malouf read a lot, and as a result produce stimulating essays. Saul Bellow, the best American novelist of the past half-century, confesses, “I am of course an autodidact, as modern writers always are,” and this posthumous selection of essays puts him among the best commentators too.
As the book’s title explains, we are today so bombarded by foreground chatter, crises, information overload and media blitzes that we’re constantly distracted: “Each of us stands in the middle of things, exposed to the great public noise.” So taken up are we by public events that our very personalities have been, as Bellow shows, appropriated by our own history: “waves of disintegrative details wash over us and threaten to wear away all sense of order and proportion”. Wordsworth believed the world is “too much with us”; T.S. Eliot…
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
