Books
-
As Michael Easson notes in his new Chris Watson biography, Labor's first PM sought to civilise capitalism, not bring it downSeptember 15, 2024
9 mins
-
The Arabs lost in1948 and have since used a motley collection of Circassian, Turkish, Jordanian, Syrian and Lebanese Arabs, renamed Palestinians in 1967, to ceaselessly prosecute the original war of rejectionSeptember 11, 2024
10 mins
-
From a perspective of some eighty years it is possible to misunderstand or underestimate the intensity of the fears—but also the hopes and aspirations—of the British people as they faced up to another colossal existential challenge, less than a full generation after what, it was now suddenly clear, had only been the first world warSeptember 10, 2024
12 mins
The latest
-
Like the soul itself, the imaginal conversation both traverses the boundary of death and intimates enduring mortal realities. The omission of question marks in the interrogatives points towards one locus of pathos in the poem, our awareness of such interactions’ limitations.August 29, 2024
11 mins
-
Pascoe invents Aboriginal farmers; Harney looked at Darwin and knew individuals who were trying to enter a white world: “Let them grow a garden and they soon felt the full weight of kinship ties when, at harvest time, their hosts of relations came to help them—not to gather, but to eat the crop.”August 29, 2024
14 mins
-
Clark’s account is dizzying, traversing what he sagely calls the only truly European revolution. He moves across France, Prussia, Hungary, Wallachia, Poland, Croatia, Spain, and beyond.August 29, 2024
9 mins
-
The new generation of 'anti-racists', including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo and Ibraham X. Kendi, have found various ways to confirm their neoracist analysis. In its simplest form, this one sentence by Kendi encapsulates their argument: 'When I see racial disparities, I see racism'August 25, 2024
17 mins
-
Bastiat was born before his time. He couldn’t have imagined how much worse things could get. Yet to come was Keynesianism and, coming up behind, the wellspring of unseen economic carnage and limitless waste, so-called climate change.August 25, 2024
8 mins
-
Accept a silly author's even sillier argument and you will believe marriage is a patriarchal pyre upon which all married women find themselves sooner or later. Accordingly, the sixteenth-century witch-burners and torturers are -- go on, have a guess -- modern husbandsAugust 25, 2024
8 mins
-
Bruce Pascoe has made many claims to be of Aboriginal descent but has never produced a scrap of solid evidence. The 'our people' of which he writes in the opening pages of Black Duck are not his people and never have been. Race appropriation is offensive, but for page after page Australia's leading fauxborigine keeps piling it on...and on...and onAugust 25, 2024
14 mins
-
Though such irony is not the book’s dominant tone it serves to remind us that O’Brien is not a poet who takes himself too seriously. Humour is a welcome and recurrent element, reminiscent perhaps of the “comic relief” in Macbeth’s “porter” scene.August 25, 2024
6 mins
-
These are interesting and valuable poems to ponder in times when little country churches are put up for sale as bed-and-breakfast investments or to create a capital fund for bishops to do new things, while paying reparations for abusive clergy. Or perhaps it is the last of the nuns’ religious houses, since they are no more.August 25, 2024
9 mins
