Tribute
-
Quadrant mourns Lee Shrubb, Executive Editor from 1977 to 1983. Son Joshua writes of a working life consumed by 'chivvying typesetters, dragging the proofreader from the pub, and finding an alternative when the printer burned down." As a tribute to a remarkable woman we republish an excerpt of a refugee's sunny childhood in the Bondi of the Forties
August 25, 2024
15 mins
-
The pauses in Sandy's monologues were worthy of Beckett. Critics acclaimed a ‘darkness reminiscent of Philip Larkin’, ‘Ezra Pound with the lights out’ and a pervading ‘Checkovian melancholy’. Barry more prosaically described Sandy as the voice of a different and vanishing Melbourne 'talking in its sleep'
April 29, 2023
11 mins
-
It is not often acknowledged that Barry Humphries was a conservative and, for a big slice of his adult life, close to Quadrant. It was in these pages that Sir Les first stirred and, before that in his column, 'Pseuds Corner', he impaled the poseurs of public life on the barbs of their own, most embarrassing pretensions
April 24, 2023
5 mins
The latest
-
"Not to succumb to anger, self-pity or despair when almost any other human would and instead to have accepted this modern day crucifixion, walking humbly in the footsteps of Our Lord, that’s the heroic virtue that makes him, to my mind, a saint for our times."
February 2, 2023
6 mins
-
David Barnett, who died in Canberra last month, was a […]
August 30, 2022
7 mins
-
People speak of the Tall Poppy syndrome in Australian culture […]
August 30, 2022
14 mins
-
“Big Sister” Robin Marsden (1936–2021), who sadly succumbed to faculties-withering […]
February 25, 2022
7 mins
-
For several years in the Seventies, Robin Marsden was Quadrant's only full-time employee, shouldering every month the Herculean labours of one on whom everything depends. 'I have been blessed,' she would later write, 'to have worked as an editor with some of our finest writers.' And they, it must be said, were privileged to have worked with her
December 12, 2021
6 mins
-
I had been meeting Philip Ayres quite regularly for five […]
November 29, 2021
24 mins
-
On December 11, 2020, James R. Flynn passed away. Flynn […]
April 29, 2021
11 mins
-
Growing up as the only child of a bereaved mother was surely the root of his eagerness to please — of the reluctance to be boring that weighed on him like a moral obligation. He wanted to live the life his parents were denied, to speak every language and read every book, to make phrases that were light on their feet but laden with universal truth
March 12, 2020
41 mins
-
It was Paris, May 1968, when Roger Scruton saw into […]
February 27, 2020
28 mins