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
The Tennyson Touch
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.
My mother, Alexandra Hasluck, had recently spent some years completing a book about the letters of Lady Audrey Tennyson, the wife of Hallam Tennyson, eldest son and biographer of the famous poet. Audrey’s husband served as Governor of South Australia and a few years later went on to serve as Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia from 1902 to 1904. My mother’s book, which was about to be published by the National Library in Canberra, was called Audrey Tennyson’s Vice-Regal Days, for that was the story reflected in Audrey’s letters to her mother in England.
In the course of editing these letters, my mother had been corresponding at some length with Sir Charles Tennyson as the book gradually assumed its final form. Naturally, in fulfilling my mother’s wish that…
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
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
This is the paradox of the War Against the Past: those who are waging it are, inadvertently, denying themselves the capacity to win. For if your past is evil, if your centuries-old story is defined by bitterness and bad faith, how can you possibly hope to redeem yourself?
Aug 29 2024
11 mins
