“Not another bloody photo of a church!” It was early evening in Valencia. My sister-in-law was wheezing through the end of a cigarette, my phone in her other hand. She frowned, exhaling with tedium and a touch of irritation at the eccentricity of it: only a foreigner could be bothered with all that history and […]

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The University of Sydney was not unfamiliar ground for me when I first arrived on the campus as a student in 1989. I had lived practically next door for most of my childhood, and, in the days before the university became a sneaky through route for traffic, I used to pedal my bike around it […]

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23/5/00 The ghosts that walk beside us Today a postcard arrived from Les telling how he has met my army cousin, Richard, during a poetry tour of East Anglia and shared an Indian meal with him. “I was amused to note less of the army manner in him than I see in your good self,” […]

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It was my great misfortune to be marooned in the vest-pocket nation before chronic electrical-supply problems were fixed. Now that an abundance of electricity has brought even indoor skiing to the sweltering kingdom, I look back on an experience that only a carbon-phobic Greens voter might envy

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John Carroll’s memoir in the May issue of Quadrant has stimulated me to write about my experience travelling politically in the diametrically opposite direction from him. He and I were at Cambridge at almost the same time, my last year being his first. I was then on the committee of the Cambridge University Conservative Association […]

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Ill and housebound, our correspondent turned to the ABC for diversion, only to have his blood pressure further elevated by a litany of glib inaccuracies. An arrogant and smugly superior response to the polite suggestion that a correction would be in order did nothing to make him feel better

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Cittamani is a Buddhist organisation formed to meet the needs of people dying in their homes. It is not income-assessed. Nurses’ and volunteers’ regular visits enable most people to die in familiar surroundings near people they love—not in a hospital or nursing home bed. Not in a “broom cupboard”, as my mother described my father’s […]

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I was not yet six years old when the Russians came to our provincial town in the north-west of Hungary. I don’t know the date but it was early European spring, in 1945. There wasn’t any serious fighting in the immediate vicinity that I know of, although there were three burned-out Russian tanks two or […]

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The Left impulse has been aggressively hostile, seeking to undermine existing authorities without replacing them. The art it endorses must shock, values have to be deconstructed, meanings exposed as rationalisations for entrenched wealth and privilege

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Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify […]

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