The Battles of Billy Sing Put away your newspaper, and listen to these words, I’ll tell a tale the likes of which, I’m sure you’ve never heard. William Edward “Billy” Sing, Oz’s finest sniper, called the Anzac Angel of Death, and the Ypres Viper. His father, born in Shanghai, mother, an English nurse, his Chinese-Aussie […]

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It doesn’t bother me one iota that most of my career has been playing people who are not —well, let’s say that people wouldn’t aspire to be like them.  —Timothy Spall In 2014 and 2019, the British actor Timothy Spall appeared in leading roles in two films about major English painters, respectively, J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) […]

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If you want to understand Hitler, you have to understand he was an artist first.                                                                  —Albert Speer In my poem “If Hitler also Spelled Hiedler”, published in the March 2014 issue of Quadrant, I proposed the following “what if” scenario: If Hitler also spelled Hiedler Hüttler or Huettler at seventeen had remained in watercolour […]

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Cookbooks for Poets Ann Rogers’ Poor Poets’ Cookbook— a nickel dinner, fresh roll, real butter, and a glass of wine, Onion Pie, Black Beans and Rum. Inspired by Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife, 1824— curry of catfish, barbecued shoat & beaten biscuits, fried calf’s feet, pheasant à-la-daube, tansy pudding, pickled nasturtiums, walnut catsup, vinegar of […]

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The serpent that did sting thy father’s life now wears his crown. —Shakespeare, Hamlet Lèse-majesté translates as “injury to majesty”, or an insult to the dignity of the monarch. It was first made a crime during the Roman Empire. The last prosecution for the offence in the UK was in 1715. France created another variation […]

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When Walter Tevis’s novel came out in 1983, it slipped past the mainstream media, but everyone I knew in the Melbourne chess world was familiar with it. Little did anyone at the time suspect that his fantasy of a female chess prodigy would be incarnated in the true story of the three Hungarian-Jewish Polgár sisters

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Disappearance of Harold Holt The PM had been advised to swim less, that day at Cheviot Beach, in Portsea, Harold had often swum there in the past. He wanted relief from the hot day’s blast, to work up an appetite before tea, Harold had often swum there in the past. The doctor medicated his distress: […]

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In August 1945 the British government agreed to give refuge to 300 child survivors of the German death camps. The dramatised account of their stories and those of the men and women who helped them rebuild lives that had known nothing but torment is a compelling testament to both the worst and best of the human heart

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Long before COVID-19, pandemics of a far more virulent nature stalked the imaginations of novelists and screenwriters, from 'The Andromeda Strain' to Hollywood's more recent fascination with zombie hordes. In Wiltshire, with the help of Russian assassins and the Novichuk nerve agent, those fancies took flesh

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Uncouth Bacilli as George Bernard Shaw called them. Arguing for redundancy, he spelled cant and hes. Flicks, forming noun plurals, earned nicknames: rogue apostrophes, greengrocer’s apostrophes. The English Journal declared them unnecessary stating context resolved ambiguity. Deppenapostroph (Idiot’s Apostrophe) is the use of correct English apostrophes, incorrectly, in written German, to aid pronunciation, eg. banana’s […]

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