Ugly scenes this week at Lord's are yet another reminder that cricket and its code of gentlemanly behaviour are honoured often in the breach. So it has always been, as Roger Underwood reminded Quadrant readers in 2011. Today, as the Long Room's chinless Poms sustain their apoplexy with choruses of 'Cheat!' and 'Shame!', it's worth revisiting England's original crimes against sportsmanship, 'the spirit of the game' and, ultimately, one of their own, Harold Larwood

The monarch could not change the law according to his will and whim. To do that, he needed the permission of his subjects, or at least those of his subjects who controlled the established institutions. This was the lasting significance of the Magna Carta, whose 800th anniversary we celebrate today

You would think the question of why Australia was founded […]

It was not by chance that Australia was chosen as […]

Reality television and the public’s fascination with medical tele-dramas have […]

David Lee’s well-researched biography, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Australian Internationalist, provides […]

One of the most chilling images in the recent SBS […]

Don Parties On played at the Playhouse at the Arts […]

George W. Bush, Decision Points (Random House, 2010).  With Decision Points […]

1 Those throaty wattlebirds, What do they gargle? The flame-trees’ […]

Any claim I might ever make to be a fair […]

Michael Waterhouse, Not a Poor Man’s Field (Halstead Press, 2010 […]

James D. Wolfensohn, A Global Life (Macmillan, 2010).  Jim Wolfensohn […]

This chapter is another from The Poets’ Stairwell, a picaresque […]

This is a true story, I think. It began when […]

Part 1 of “Why Our Major Cities Are in Decay” […]

Both Sydney and Melbourne express pathologies of modern urban planning. […]

Part II is published in April Quadrant. Subscribe now… In […]

William Rubinstein, Professor of History at the University of Wales-Aberystwyth, […]

In recent years, political journalists have taken seriously the notion […]

The Rudd government fulfilled its 2007 election promise to develop […]

The Crusades and Modern Genocide SIR: I wondered how long […]

Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is that rarest of all cinematic […]

At school, boys all, we were studying The Thirty-Nine Steps, […]

Daniel Hannan, The New Road to Serfdom (HarperCollins, 2010).  Dinesh […]

 Nothing is sweeter to my ears than the voice of […]

The bosomy woman in her floral frock and shiny shoes  […]

Driving to Oregon in ’66— October or November? I forget— […]

 i As I did not die in my sleep, my […]

A starburst, the El Alamein fountain in blossom, the spattered […]

That knot that tightens as it travels with you;  the […]

the sea delivers its endless lines [all centred]  

The Widower Dark under dark pines the house there somewhere. […]

 In bedrooms of Australia they are waking up and saying […]

 John and I sit together in a tree and chew  […]

 Stroke Poems  Tumour That knot that tightens as it travels […]

 I’m transfixed by a pair of bees, not bees searching […]

 Gorgeous expansion of life all day at the university— then […]

 We’re advised to open the windows only a crack else […]

The Word: Two Hundred Years of Polish Poetry, translated by Marcel Weyland; Brandl & Schlesinger, 2010, 480 pages, $39.95.

A man may be an admirable poet without being an exact chronologer. 

—John Dryden

Almost ten long years have passed since Marcel Weyland published what must have appeared at the time as his magnum opus—the English translation of Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz. It was a major triumph of dedication, hard work, patience and poetic inspiration. The silence that followed was, however, a very productive period. It came to fruition with the publication last year of an even more ambitious translation project: The Word. 

Weyland does not offer any conventionally chronological, pedestrian history of Polish poetry. What he proposes is a rather personal, occasionally idiosyncratic, selection of poems and poets who for various reasons attracted his attention in his meanderings through the rather complicated cultural and political history of Poland.

One of the great political dramas in Western civilisation since […]