December 2015 Volume LIX, Number 12, No. 522
Brian Sewell and other matters
The Myth of Multicultural Amity
The Sins of the Fathers
Europe’s Fatal Contradiction
Zealots and Fanatics, Not Radicals David Martin Jones
A Time for Enlightened Patriotism
Contents
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Sir: Giles Auty’s appreciation (November 2015) of the recently deceased […]December 1, 2015
7 mins
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Malcolm Turnbull is fond of proclaiming that Australia is a multicultural society, but this is loose talk. A multicultural society is a contradiction in terms, since common cultural understandings are the glue that holds a society together. Just look at France and the way its very fabric is ripped asunder
December 1, 2015
9 mins
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The social security system in Britain makes it possible, and perhaps even profitable, for parents -- the word is used only in the biological sense -- to bring children into the world without thought or care. That indifference is matched by the policeDecember 4, 2015
8 mins
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Even more than most other first-world nations modern Europe suffers […]
December 1, 2015
9 mins
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Islamic State and its media units release over 90,000 social […]
December 1, 2015
14 mins
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On Friday November 13, 2015, three teams of armed Salafi […]
December 1, 2015
7 mins
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The focus on race misses the bigger issue, which is not too much child removal but too little, not too few kinship placements but too many inappropriate ones. Indigenous community representatives making heated claims about a repeat of the Stolen Generations need to be held to accountDecember 30, 2015
24 mins
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The wish seems to be that legislative power is expressed in a more positive way. This sounds like a nice thing to do, but it involves huge trouble and expense for which there is no need -- the single and pointless exception being Section 25, whose removal would be tidy, do no harm and achieve nothingDecember 30, 2015
22 mins
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China’s “market Leninism” graphically illustrates the tension between a static political system and a fast-changing, globally integrated market economy. Will China’s party-state adapt, or will it stagnate and get stuck in the middle-income trap? The auguries are not good.January 2, 2016
29 mins
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Right or wrong in its economic specifics, the Pontiff's Laudato Si encyclical draws attention to the wide material gap between rich and poor and to the insuperable problem of bridging it. The Pope surely has a point, even if his nostrums are not wholly of this worldJanuary 11, 2016
20 mins
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The suffocating sense of guilt that afflicts university life has beenwhipped into a cocktail of self-congratulation, on the one hand, and menacing intolerance, on the other. Doubtless it portends many things, but support for liberal education or liberal society, properly understood, is not among themDecember 28, 2015
13 mins
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The best free performance in Paris took place in a […]
December 1, 2015
11 mins
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P.G. Wodehouse reserved his wit for the page, lecturing Evelyn Waugh about the scourge of taxes at their first meeting and declining to join the Algonquin Round Table's long and liquid lunches. There was work to do, he said, giving readers now and future cause to hail such dedicationJanuary 16, 2016
13 mins
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Before Jack Higgins, Ian Fleming, Frederick Forsyth, Wilbur Smith and all the other authors who have made the wrongly accused rogue male their hero, there was John Buchan's urbane and gentlemanly Richard Hannay, still the most endearing of the lotJanuary 23, 2016
12 mins
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January is the silly season, that time of the year when news organisations give undue prominence to follies and the fanciful. In 1987, as temperatures soared, Joh Bjelke-Petersen launched his bid to conquer Canberra and silliness strode the country on stiltsJanuary 20, 2016
12 mins
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Going Out Backwards: A Grafton Everest Adventure by Ross Fitzgerald […]
December 1, 2015
6 mins
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My Brilliant Friend The Story of a New Name Those […]
December 1, 2015
13 mins
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Doctor Zhivago was transformed during the Cold War from a Siberian soap opera into a worldwide symbol of resistance to tyranny. How a competent but unexceptional novel came to achieve this status is a story far more interesting than the book itselfJanuary 13, 2016
11 mins
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Kin: A Real People’s History of Our Nation by Nick […]
December 1, 2015
5 mins
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Our mortality, our groundlessness and our insatiability, asserts Brazilian philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, are ineradicable flaws in the human condition. We need a religion that acknowledges these realities unflinchingly and builds itself unyieldingly on the granite foundation of existential realism that they provideJanuary 3, 2016
18 mins
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There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction […]
December 1, 2015
6 mins
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In "Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism", Larry Siedentop illustrates how the modern world emerged not in spite of the Church but because of it. His book is a rebuke to those of Christianity's critics who fail to separate the gospel of grace from the abuse of religion by evil menJanuary 24, 2016
13 mins
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Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings by Owen Hatherley […]
December 1, 2015
11 mins
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Lucilla Wyborn d’Abrera's magnificent "Constance Stokes: Art & Life" is a book to be treasured -- a just tribute to an oft-overlooked artist of the front rank. As one of our leading Modernists, she should never be forgottenDecember 12, 2015
13 mins
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The point -- one of them -- that Niall Ferguson raises in the first volume of his biography of Henry Kissinger is that any coherent arrangement for world order must give more freedom of action to the major powers which created that order in the first placeDecember 21, 2015
13 mins
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A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk Hamish Hamilton, […]
December 1, 2015
11 mins
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1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear by James Shapiro […]
December 1, 2015
11 mins
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In his book The Catholic Imagination in American Literature, Ross […]
December 1, 2015
11 mins
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Verdi: Aida. Pappano/Orchestra e Coro dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. […]
December 1, 2015
8 mins
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Why are Christians mocked with a vitriol that would be “hate speech” if directed at any other group? Opposition by some of Christ's followers to elements of the liberal-progressive agenda must surely be one reason. Another might be that our brave artists target only those who turn the other cheekDecember 27, 2015
8 mins
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Elizabeth Durack’s art has been an integral part of the […]
December 1, 2015
9 mins
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In 1953, when the King and Queen of Thailand found themselves delayed in Perth, they were treated by Vice-Regal functionaries to what was deemed, in those days of unenlightened gastronomy, appropriate fare: the local Chinese eatery, complete with backyard dunnyDecember 19, 2015
8 mins
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When he was released ahead of schedule from his prison […]
December 1, 2015
12 mins
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Chet Baker in Japan Ravaged Chet Baker, Junkie prince […]
December 1, 2015
1 mins
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Toothpick Woman The toothpick woman left no footprints. She […]
December 1, 2015
1 mins
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Getting a Headache I was getting another of […]
December 1, 2015
2 mins
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Conversation with Socrates Sometimes he would walk between the small […]
December 1, 2015
2 mins
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From the Tree A puzzling pile of grass and sticks […]
December 1, 2015
2 mins
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“That’ll be the Day” Pretty soon the last of […]
December 1, 2015
2 mins
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The Flow Mostly it happens outside hunkered down by […]
December 1, 2015
2 mins
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You I remember everything about that afternoon. And then, […]
December 1, 2015
2 mins
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Lucas Windfall Lucas Windfall quit his cradle, took with […]
December 1, 2015
5 mins
