Applying literary analysis to a fairy tale is akin to using paint stripper on a daffodil. If a reader, of any age, does not understand what the stories are about they have opened the wrong book. Tiina Nunnally's new and splendid translation of Hans Christian Andersen's stories understands this and has restored the author's long lost voice. It is very much the right book

Read More

French journalist Albert Londres' remarkable 'The Wandering Jew Has Arrived' suggests histories of the Holocaust should consider far more deeply the influence of Eastern Europe's pogroms' on both the future victims and those volunteers who aided with such enthusiasm the later Nazi work of extermination

Read More

Plagiarism, misquotation, vague dates, variable death tolls and scenes of alleged conflict that leap about the countryside according to the need of researchers who all too often spurn primary sources in favour of whatever suits the narrative of slaughter -- that's how to draw a 'massacre map'

Read More

Curious and more than somewhat sceptical of two much-lauded maps purporting to chart some 300 colonial massacres, I selected thirty Western District events and set to work checking their sources. What I found was plagiarism, gross inaccuracy, slipshod scholarship and damning evidence of the researchers' incurious laziness

Read More

In Australia those who know Bruce Pascoe’s book is damaging stupidity are too frightened to criticise the cultural establishment and the vile Twitter mob they cultivate, not to mention the question of careerism. While they remain mute and a charlatan capers from award to academic sinecure, a French academic and man of the Left isn't so reticent

Read More

'Have you turned conservative?' It was the early 1980s, I was back in Australia, and the speaker was a friend I had made during the campaign for Whitlam in London. It was the last time I saw her. Those on the Left are very aware that something is wrong with us even before we are. They are a sensitive lot, ever ready to scent dissent

Read More

Bruce Pascoe has robbed Aboriginal Australia of its essential and millennial experience of hunter-gathering and its associated beliefs and traditions and replaced them with an elderly counter-culturalist’s fantasy of Earth Garden agriculturists, hippie cooking and Green Left Weekly village/commune dwellers

Read More

Evan Pederick, the subject of Imre Salusinszky's new book, is an Anglican priest, but in 1978 he was the Ananda Marga cultist who atomised four innocent men outside the Sydney Hilton. Phillip Adams deems the killer 'brave'. Brave? Brave are those who suffered, not the reformed butcher the account of whose youth suggests an absurdist anti-hero and outsider

Read More

Alex didn’t know that Betty’s husband had tried to have him tortured and murdered. Neither did Eileen, Alex’s wife. By the time this was revealed in Peter Hruby’s book Dangerous Dreamers (2010) they had all died natural deaths. I knew these people at the time of the Vietnam War when Whitlam was just moving into […]

Read More

'It seems impossible for many Muslims to admit that 'Charlie Hebdo' was not guilty of any crime in publishing caricatures of Mohammed,' writes the artist Riss in his survivor's memoir of the 2015 attack. Rightly, he is especially critical of the 'collabos' who politely turn their gaze from the destruction of free speech and traditional freedoms by Islamic fascism

Read More