Many slaves who made the dangerous journey to Canada would return, at great risk, to help others find their precarious ways out of bondage. These heroic souls became known as 'conductors' and their stories are inspirational. Amazon's 'The Underground Railroad' is a work of fiction. Remember this and it will help keep your balance when the train goes off the tracks

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Constellation Victoria’s Secret Dylan. Las Vegas Elvis. Toupéed Sinatra. Nose-lifted Jackson. Door-hung Hutchence. Five Emperors repose indolently, in Elysium, or Hell, or Nowhere, attended, foot and hand, by tattooed cherubim roadies. Four have nodded off, the fifth releases Sacred Wind. The gallery genuflects. Meanwhile, Somewhere, five children gaze out windows of midnight schoolrooms, lesson-bored, staring […]

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Clearly Not Fourth Street With your fish hook mouth in the bottom-feeder times, and your eyes like marbles and your skin like rind, and your silver scales and your sermon that whines, Oh, who among the fishermen could fry you? With your pockets full of correct tokens at last, but the streetcar departing that you […]

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Mankind never gains anything without cost. There never has been a bloodless victory over nature.                                                    —Yuri Gagarin, first cosmonaut in outer space Many Quadrant readers will remember the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Through films like The Right Stuff (1983), about Chuck Yeager’s first sound barrier breakthrough in 1947 […]

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'Six Minutes to Midnight' is very entertaining, beautiful to look at and offers a glimpse at a little-known anomaly in British and German war history. That said, the true story of the academy at Bexhill-on-Sea for the daughters of Nazi diplomats and military brass might have made a more interesting film than than the fictions of a B-grade secret agent story

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Seven Words for Les Murray Self-addressed stamped envelope pigeons home. Tear it open! Poetry editor’s comment: sorry I can’t like any of these … Ah—so why do I feel empowered reading those seven familiar words, more so than acceptances by most other editors? Better to be abused than ignored, a habitually mistreated friend once told […]

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TV's 'Bates Motel' is a completely different creature from its cinematic inspiration. It takes place in the present time, with the motel, the famous Gothic house-on-the-hill and interior sets painstakingly recreated. But this is no mere pulp reprise, rather an outstanding five-season prequel with a gifted ensemble cast

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The actor who has brought the artists Turner and Lowry to the screen and, indeed, to life, trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he was honoured as the year’s most promising actor. Those who recognised his talent were not misguided

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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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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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