January - February 2009 Volume LIII, No. 1-2
The Two Horsemen
Hollow Man of Yesterday
Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson
A Family History of Smoking by Andrew Riemer
Toulouse-Lautrec
A Last Message from Your Leaders; Respected Poet
Contents
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It used to take Four Horsemen in their day
To push the Apocalyptic ending throughJanuary 1, 2009
1 mins
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Most serious readers of Australian history have long since laid […]
January 1, 2009
14 mins
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How does one take tragic loss, personal loneliness, financial hardship and social disorientation, and turn them into success and fulfilment? Simple: ask the “Surplus Women” of interwar Britain. Here they are, clutching their umbrellas, redoubtable in their well-worn tweeds, cats curled on their laps, or standing with a foot on the shovel of their allotment garden, arm in arm with their best friend; on the catwalk, on the stage, on the radio, in the nursery, at work on the ward, in the office, and down at the pub.
January 1, 2009
5 mins
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Smoking is a source of shame in our era, with workers expelled from their glass towers to puff furtively in the street, and party guests sent to smoke outside. How different it all was, just a few decades ago, when smoking and sophistication went hand in hand, when the heroines of screwball comedies flicked ash as nonchalantly as they dispensed wisecracks.
January 1, 2009
7 mins
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I bought discarded love for fifty cents:
An art book in a pile, Toulouse-Lautrec
January 1, 2009
2 mins
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We have made ourselves shelters, deep underground shelters
One hundred and fifty feet downJanuary 1, 2009
3 mins
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Dear Matchmaking Powers up above,
It’s not for me to meddle in your planJanuary 1, 2009
1 mins
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The poet is a faker. And aren’t you,
pretending you have no hand in this verse?
January 1, 2009
1 mins
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Forget about the cash. It’s all been spent,
Squirrelled away or scattered to the wide.
January 1, 2009
1 mins
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No evil so extreme, no act so dire
but it makes our commentator’s day.
January 1, 2009
1 mins
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A sudden sea of flags and faces.
Who called out and dressed these ranks
January 1, 2009
2 mins
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This slim catalogue of pieties—a deontology, the French would call it—will come as a surprise to admirers of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s taut and vivid accounts of some of the globe’s major wars, coups and revolutions of the last forty years. The Other is a collection of three lectures delivered four years ago at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, rounded off with three addresses, all on the subject of what is rebarbatively called in academic circles “alterity”. Except for one short address, “My Other” (1990), the entire book dates from the time when he was working on his last major work, Travels with Herodotus, itself a rather mellow and reflective book on his life as a conscientious reporter. Herodotus, it ought to be remembered, although the “father of history”, was also accused in his day of being a terrible fibber.
January 1, 2009
12 mins
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That little house is the madman’s house
With an anchor in the gardenJanuary 1, 2009
1 mins
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If I get lost someone will pick me up and post me.
I am already licked and stamped on my green lapel.
January 1, 2009
1 mins
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The present world financial crisis has seen the great economist […]
January 1, 2009
50 mins
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Abstract The Garnaut Report sets out targets for reductions of […]
January 1, 2009
13 mins
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From early 2004 until a year later, the Australian Major […]
January 1, 2009
16 mins
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White pearls and white clothing, a genteel face softly made […]
January 1, 2009
11 mins
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The lunchtime Freethought Society meeting in the Philosophy Room at […]
January 1, 2009
16 mins
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I was gratified to be approached by the producer-director of […]
January 1, 2009
20 mins
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No matter how many valuable functions the city has furthered, […]
January 1, 2009
42 mins
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Claude Monet has been around for too long for us to expect any aesthetic surprises—those little shocks to the ocular engine were all absorbed, and rapidly enough, by the salon habitués of the 1860s and beyond. But one must not look a gift horse in the mouth. Some twenty-nine works by the master and his contemporaries—Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cézanne, Degas and Sisley among others—have arrived in Sydney.
January 1, 2009
9 mins
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In the April 2006 edition of Quadrant, Giles Auty denounced […]
January 1, 2009
14 mins
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In last September’s issue of Quadrant, Sydney lawyer Baron Alder […]
January 1, 2009
16 mins
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Under the McMahon government, and during my time as Minister […]
January 1, 2009
18 mins
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One of the most revelatory anecdotes in William Manchester’s intimate […]
January 1, 2009
13 mins
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For several centuries the Inns of Court were called “The […]
January 1, 2009
13 mins
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Quadrant readers will remember America’s “science wars”, spearheaded by the […]
January 1, 2009
15 mins
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When the Editor of Quadrant initiated, in March 2008, “a […]
January 1, 2009
27 mins
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It was towards the end of 2008. The economy was […]
January 1, 2009
8 mins
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We married in Sydney in October 1958 and left for […]
January 1, 2009
30 mins
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Memory is a strange thing. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, […]
January 1, 2009
13 mins
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To be a Prodigal’s Favourite—then, worse truth, A Miser’s Pensioner—behold […]
January 1, 2009
11 mins
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The other day someone asked me the question every writer […]
January 1, 2009
8 mins
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What is Evil? Is evil anything that oughtn’t to exist […]
January 1, 2009
34 mins
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This chapter is from a picaresque novel-in-progress entitled The Poets’ […]
January 1, 2009
23 mins
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This short book, from the fertile pen of Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter, is about historical counterfactuals, in other words about the philosophy of history. A counterfactual is a proposition running counter to, or substantively “replacing”, in our imagination or investigations, what is in fact the case. The philosophy underlying the views of those who find historical counterfactuals—what did not happen—crucial in the understanding of the actual record—what did happen—is “radical indeterminacy”, the view, roughly speaking, that history is an open question because human beings are free.
January 1, 2009
10 mins