There is a semi-serious theory of nominative determinism, according to which a name may influence a person’s life choices. While it doesn't quite explain why seven-year-old Rhythm Pacheco is a politically correct scold, it does suggest Liberian lawyer Hitler Coleman has attempted to live down his name by defending the rule of law

Read More

As a prison doctor, I wondered why so many black inmates converted to Islam rather than reverting to the Christianity of their childhoods. My notion is that they feel massively ill-treated by society and, knowing how most people in society regard Islam, the creed is a perfect and natural fit

Read More

Supposing I claimed a man entered my house and stole goods from me, but there was no collateral or corroboratory evidence of his having done so: would any court take me seriously? In Victoria, were the man I accused George Pell, my reading of the appeals court judgment strongly suggests I would have the satisfaction of seeing him imprisoned

Read More

Suppose that after the war a Nazi criminal had said that he was sorry, that he now realised slaughtering immense numbers of people was very wrong and he would never do it again. Would such a monster's tears of regret, faux or genuine, earn him the gift of clemency? Unlikely, you say, but such is the guiding attitude at work daily in our courts

Read More

Where human beings are concerned, there is no new thing under the sun. Ravening egotists and narcissists there have always been, and always will be. The question and all too often the problem is not that they exist, but their number and proportion in the population

Read More

In daily life, in professional life, in very nearly every aspect of modern life, one is subjected to ever more bureaucratic procedures of no conceivable value except to make us feel that we are small and under surveillance -- tiny cogs in a large and not terribly bright machine

Read More

I remember the days of the Gentlemen versus Players at Lord’s, the former being amateurs, at least nominally, and the latter professionals of lower social standing. They were all, as far as my blinkered eyes could see, gentlemen. Then along came Kerry Packer …

Read More

We have yet to see 'Corialanus' set on a Number 46 tram, but give your modern theatre companies time and it is a certainty such a travesty and worse will come to pass. The play's the thing, as they used to say, but not for the woke ranks of today's socially conscious directors

Read More

The western taipan ranks high among the world's most poisonous snakes, though the purpose of such extraordinary and superfluous lethality defies any possible explanation I can conjure. Unlike the logic behind differing punishments for murder and mass murder, I am once more a child in my bafflement

Read More

It is a characteristic of our age that what no one truly believes so often and so quickly becomes intellectual orthodoxy -- look to the escalating denigration of Captain Cook as but one example -- and from which the slightest deviation invites opprobrium and banishment

Read More