June 2024 Volume LXVIII, Number 6, No. 607
The Lonely Aristocracy of True Art
Respite
The Muddle-Headed Wombat Abroad
Simple Questions
Knopfelmacher: On the Right Side
The Shape of a Reading Life
Contents
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Liberal heroes are limited to superhero franchises, because they cannot be human beings; the logical incarnation of the liberal hero is the antihero. Contrary to popular belief, we still need heroes, and the lukewarm selection we have been recently served by those toiling in what Adorno called the culture industry do not pass musterJuly 24, 2024
17 mins
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In the hands of authors Ross Fitzgerald & Ian McFadyen, Grafton Everest's latest adventure -- the ninth in the much loved series -- is a device for exposing the absurdities and unintended consequences of wrong-headed NGOs, disingenuous environmentalists and crony capitalismJuly 7, 2024
9 mins
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Labor’s confusion over the status of women make you wonder why they were all so keen on legalising same-sex marriage. What was the point when barely any of them know the difference? From the Left’s point of view, every marriage is potentially same-sex. It just depends on how wedded to their own biology the couple may beJune 30, 2024
8 mins
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Having lived under both Stalin and Hitler he knew first-hand that those dictators had more in common than their claimed differences. It was no less than his duty to rouse a flabby population to appreciate and defend their freedom. In this regard Frank had signifcant and enduring impact on a generationJune 28, 2024
9 mins
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I saw the tattooed number on his forearm. It was a shock that disturbed me then and I have never forgotten ... My short life lived through books saw the reality of another life. I had grown up with a literary fantasy of what we now call the Holocaust. I idealised the victims. An unsympathetic man made it realJune 27, 2024
11 mins
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As studies have repeatedly confirmed, most gender-confused children will revert to an identity congruent with chromosomes with the help of traditional -- but now criminalised -- psychotherapy, psychiatric and social care. To the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's ideologues, that's a problem not a positiveJune 25, 2024
33 mins
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It is a strange irony that politicians and policy-makers of Labor orientation should think it necessary for working people who do not possess a university degree to have one as some kind of validation of their worth. Would I hold my electrician in higher regard if he had a degree? Would he have a higher regard of himself? The ideas are preposterousJune 24, 2024
14 mins
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One key plank of today’s anti-nationalist agitators’ logic is the airy assertion that the nation-state is an artificial and arbitrary construct. Thus do internationalists speak derisively of 'imagined communities', as if somehow there was no inherent difference between Belgium and Bahrain, or Japan and JordanJune 23, 2024
12 mins
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With most conservative parties split between populist and establishment wings, […]June 22, 2024
9 mins
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Taking half of somebody’s hard-earned money is immoral. Taking half of somebody’s income to give it to people who don't work in the hope that they will vote for the politicians delivering the largesse, is even more immoral. A nation where effort is punished and laziness rewarded has no future. Without reform, that is Australia's certain futureJune 20, 2024
8 mins
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The outrageous appointment in 2014 as Middle East Correspondent of left-wing pro-Palestinian 'advocacy journalist' Sophie McNeill marked a new low for the ABC. Throughout her career there -- she has worked for the notoriously selective Human Rights Watch since 2020 -- she demonised Israel with reports that were brazen propaganda piecesJune 19, 2024
14 mins
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For ordinary Parisians, the Olympics will be somewhat reminiscent of the Covid lockdowns, People I know are fleeing to the provinces because they would otherwise need a special pass to leave or enter the streets in which they live. Those who remain have reason to fear surging street crime, terror attacks and, mon Dieu!, even killer dronesJune 19, 2024
8 mins
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“I don’t mean to be rude, but you fit a certain mould," she said, smirking, "the unhappily married guy in a Beemer. You must’ve picked me up on the off chance I might fall in love with you on the thirty-minute drive”June 16, 2024
8 mins
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Caricatures of left-wing authoritarians have been a feature of popular culture -- including not only farces but also such sophisticated comedies as Yes, Prime Minister -- and they awaken an immediate echo in their mass audiences. There’s a reason for that. We’ve all met the leftoid sorts with jackboot inclinationsJune 14, 2024
9 mins
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Those remaining in the Anglican community face compromises that look like desperate attempts to conceal contradictions. The Archbishop of Canterbury, for instance, insists in one breath that the position on same-sex marriage is unchanged, in the next relates his 'extreme' joy' that those in them can now receive God’s blessing.June 13, 2024
8 mins
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What he presents as a philosophical argument is actually just the expression of Heidegger’s Völkisch longings -- a nostalgic yearning for a pre-industrial, pre-urban, pre-democratic, and specifically German pastoralism, coupled with a deeply reactionary hatred of every aspect of modernity, personified above all by 'the Jews'June 11, 2024
19 mins
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When a religious group promotes left-wing causes, the emptier its pews become. This seems an unbreakable rule, yet those who propagate politics from the pulpit seem not to have noticed that the Greens and their like make poor guides on the path to salvationJune 10, 2024
10 mins
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My lunch with John Paul II proved a feast for the theological mind as he ranged from building bridges with the Orthodox churches to Hegel and -- something I would never have expected -- Bernard Langer's gratitude to God after sinking a five-foot putt to win the 1993 tournament's coveted green jacketJune 8, 2024
7 mins
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The new feminism, as laid out in two new and worthwhile books by Mary Harrington and Louise Perry, takes arguments from both the left and right, leveraging the corrective tensions between each to better discern how women might participate economically and socially in a better worldJune 6, 2024
16 mins
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The real problem was not just that health minister Greg Hunt colluded with the premiers to lockdown Australia and the mandating of vaccines that were neither safe nor effective, but that he presided over the censorship and persecution of doctors, researchers and anyone else who dared to criticise the government narrativeJune 3, 2024
8 mins
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How ironic it is, then, that at the same time as this regressive yet commercial paganism, artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to, as metamodernists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker might be heard to say, catapult humanity towards a “futureless” future.June 1, 2024
20 mins
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The Winnowing Raised across the parapet of mind, words frowned […]May 28, 2024
1 mins
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Dying Thoughts of Dr Josef Mengele, while Having a Stroke […]May 28, 2024
1 mins
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Doppelgänger In sheer pink cotton dress, you lower yourself into […]
May 28, 2024
1 mins
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The Unicorn Beneath a bleeding, jagged sky There lies a […]
May 28, 2024
2 mins
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Embarkations: Ancient to Modern You remember those fables, now, of […]
May 28, 2024
1 mins
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The Romans Never Left The English say that in 410 […]
May 28, 2024
1 mins
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to a girl staring into a shop window as i […]
May 28, 2024
2 mins
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Distressed Fashionable people use this word To describe certain new-made […]
May 28, 2024
2 mins
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Botrytis cinerea It’s Latin, grapes like ashes, the fruit withered […]
May 28, 2024
1 mins
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Regent honeyeaters In the wild they are almost almost gone, […]
May 28, 2024
1 mins
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A Colonial Poet The flowers over my mother’s grave have […]
May 28, 2024
1 mins
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Unknown worlds The blood moon shines on the old world. […]
May 28, 2024
1 mins
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Body under a sheet Every morning for the last […]
May 28, 2024
2 mins
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Omaha Beach Erect in ranks, they stand as they’d have […]
May 28, 2024
1 mins
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VJJ-Day In the home of the Enlightenment The truth […]
May 28, 2024
1 mins
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Phoenix in Waiting Notre Dame, jewel in the City of […]
May 28, 2024
3 mins
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If you want a deliriously bent answer from a modern leftist—or from a bureaucrat under leftist command—just ask a straight question.May 28, 2024
10 mins
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Jack and Judy had been married for fifty-seven years and, apart from a few minor marital bumps along the way, it had gone pretty well.May 28, 2024
7 mins
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Before today, I had never picked up a hitchhiker. I guess I never had the courage, but also you don’t see them too often nowadays, at least not in the city or the suburbs.May 28, 2024
9 mins
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In October 1976 I made my way to Golders Green in north London to call on Sir Charles Tennyson, grandson of the famous poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria’s reign.May 28, 2024
8 mins
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Once it was an esteemed element of myths and in moral education, but today in schools pupils are taught the eleventh commandment, “Thou shalt not bully”, while emphasis falls on the benign effects of inclusiveness and equality.May 28, 2024
17 mins
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Peter Dinklage is arguably the most successful and gifted dwarf actor of all time. He is the most recent in a long line of famous Hollywood small actors (or midgets),May 28, 2024
18 mins
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When people learn that I lived and taught at Rome’s […]
May 28, 2024
7 mins
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There are books you save from childhood, a few that […]
May 28, 2024
11 mins
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Born at the peak of the Roman empire, Christianity quickly […]
May 28, 2024
8 mins
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The phrase “alliterative poetry” immediately connotes archaism, and a literary […]
May 28, 2024
7 mins
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Is there any point in being a satirist in the […]
May 28, 2024
9 mins
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With most conservative parties split between populist and establishment wings, […]
May 28, 2024
9 mins
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To Erik Satie’s freshness of outlook, Milhaud added a technique beyond Satie’s most sanguine hopes. Like any virtuoso, he relished surmounting near-impossible challenges, none greater than the cantata which he based on the 1961 encyclical Pacem in Terris. Confronted with bromidic Vatican prose that most other composers would view as utterly impervious to musical treatment—a sample from which reads: “A further consequence of man’s personal dignity is his right to engage in economic activities suited to his degree of responsibility”—Milhaud somehow turned such bureaucratic waffle into a dignified, periodically exalted score.May 28, 2024
8 mins
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The period from 1900 until approximately 1950 in America has become known as the Golden Age of the Accordion. Marion Jacobson, in the 2007 article “Searching for Rockordion”, comments that “it was truly an era worthy not only of the name Golden Age of the Accordion, but Golden Age of Music making among middle-class American families”. During this time, the design of the stradella piano accordion reached maturity and the accordion rose to prominence as one of the foremost popular concert instruments of the day.May 28, 2024
9 mins
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How will you advise your children? Is staying in Australia […]
May 28, 2024
8 mins
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One of the most striking developments in Australian society in […]
May 28, 2024
10 mins
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The Black Notebooks confirm that Heidegger supported National Socialism not […]
May 28, 2024
19 mins
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Once upon a time, Britain’s publicly-funded national broadcaster, like Australia’s, […]
May 28, 2024
14 mins
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Leaked Files should discredit the World Professional Association for Transgender […]
May 28, 2024
33 mins
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As the family goes, so goes the nation, and so […]
May 28, 2024
11 mins
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In 1938, Neville Chamberlain described Hitler’s demands on the Sudetenland […]
May 28, 2024
9 mins
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“A new feminism is emerging.” So goes the tagline of […]
May 27, 2024
16 mins
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We need more babies. The recently reported fertility for the […]
May 27, 2024
14 mins
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In his great book, Russia in 1839, the Marquis de […]
May 27, 2024
8 mins
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If something doesn’t exist in theory, can it exist in […]
May 27, 2024
9 mins
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This week, Zhang Zhan, a Chinese citizen journalist and former lawyer, is set to be released after four years in jail for the heinous crime of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”.May 27, 2024
9 mins
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Madam: When I went to school, many years ago, we had […]
May 27, 2024
2 mins
