Latest Articles
We are encouraged to rely more and more on government officials to do for us what we could equally well do for ourselves—and, maybe more importantly, not to do what might help us solve our own problems.
Sep 08 2024
10 mins
If we imagine a metric called the Pinocchio Scale, which measures the number of lies told by a politician as a percentage of his or her overall public statements, our current prime minister (for want of a better description), Airbus Albo, has moved well into uncharted territory.
Sep 06 2024
5 mins
Respite
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. That is until about a year ago when things began falling apart.
Jack started asking questions and very often the same ones. Take today for instance, as they sat together in the kitchen over a late breakfast.
“Where am I?” Jack asked.
“You’re here with me, darling, having breakfast,” said Judy. “We’ve been here for fifty-seven years. Same house in Bright Street.”
“Who put me here?”
“We put ourselves here, my love. First house we looked at. We both liked it. Been here ever since.”
“And where am I?” Jack gazed round the room, his eyes pausing on a photo of two smiling children in school uniforms.
“You’re with me, darling. Your boring old wife.”
“Who put me here?”
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Judy said, pushing back her chair and heading down the hall and out into the garden. She leant against the red brick…
The Editor of Quadrant Music, Alexander Voltz, has won the symphonic section of the prestigious George Enescu International Competition in Bucharest.
Sep 03 2024
1 mins
What offended him was not a lack of quality, but of purpose. He simply couldn’t tolerate—perhaps due to his profession, which was accounting—things that remained forever and intentionally ambiguous. He’d been trained to view unsolved problems as errors. To John, a balance sheet was poetry, and a bookkeeping ledger, a metaphor for human life.
Aug 29 2024
14 mins
Some have argued that Auden was a victim of his own naivety regarding the prospect of impending war. A few days before its declaration and while on a Greyhound bus at the end of that 1939 “honeymoon” with Kallman, he had written home to England: “There is a radio on this coach, so that every hour or so, one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on. By the time you get this, I suppose, we shall know one way or the other.”
Aug 29 2024
15 mins
