“The heat,” says the sweaty Border Force official in Darwin, as if it explains all his problems. He’s on the government payroll in this tropical garrison town instead of comfortably cool down south in Melbourne where he belongs, where hail is predicted for the big horse race running this week.
History casts a shadow over the Middle East at the best of times, and none more so than now. Take the phrase “two-state solution,” which has become the political currency of the moment. Few, if any, longer historical shadows have fallen across the Middle East than this reference to an
One-term federal governments in Australia are rare. The most recent — led by Labor’s James Scullin in 1931 — was one of the many victims (political and otherwise) of the Great Depression. That’s the good news for Anthony Albanese. Closer to the present day, though, Labor was forced into minority
Just a few days before Christmas 2023 the federal government announced a tough new vehicle efficiency standard for motor vehicles. The standard — which would belatedly have brought Australia into line with most other advanced economies — encountered predictable opposition from Peter Dutton and his Coalition colleagues and from affected
Just a few days before Christmas 2023 the federal government announced a tough new vehicle efficiency standard for motor vehicles. The standard — which would belatedly have brought Australia into line with most other advanced economies — encountered predictable opposition from Peter Dutton and his Coalition colleagues and from affected
If he wasn’t already a hard man when he was jailed, Yahya Sinwar was a very hard man by the time he walked out of an Israeli prison in 2011. A beneficiary of a prisoner–hostage swap, he had closely observed his Israeli guards during his twenty years of imprisonment and
Should residents of the most populous Australian city of the late-Victorian age, a status it would reclaim only in the far distant 2020s, take a bow — or should they blush? In early 1888, James Malley, formerly of Kansas and points further east, was in a proper fix. Acquitted years
In its third year, the Ukraine war has changed much, even as it keeps changing. It proclaims that the old international order is broken. How it unfolds and how it ends will say much about what new order, or disorder, is emerging. Important history keeps arriving: Russia’s initial arrogance and
In April 2019 hopes were running high in US progressive circles, with the left-wing “Squad” making its presence felt within the Democratic congressional majority and Bernie Sanders launching his second presidential campaign. Universal healthcare and tuition-free universities had returned to the realm of political possibilities, joined now by the Green
In my usual manner, I began this book by reading the conclusion. There, Susannah Gibson closes her new book on eighteenth-century intellectual women, The Bluestockings, by quoting Virginia Woolf. “It is the masculine values that prevail,” Woolf rued in 1928. “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it
As he describes them in his newly published memoir, Ron Boswell: Not Pretty, But Pretty Effective, Ron Boswell’s early years in Perth were not happy. His mother, “something of a drifter and subject to Bohemian influences,” was ill-matched with his father, “a devout and practising Roman Catholic with a conservative
Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo examines four works of postwar musical commemoration created respectively by a German, an Austrian Jew in exile, an Englishman and a Russian: Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen (1945), Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1962) and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No 13 (1962). Although
“The heat,” says the sweaty Border Force official in Darwin, as if it explains all his problems. He’s on the government payroll in this tropical garrison town instead of comfortably cool down south in Melbourne where he belongs, where hail is predicted for the big horse race running this week.
History casts a shadow over the Middle East at the best of times, and none more so than now. Take the phrase “two-state solution,” which has become the political currency of the moment. Few, if any, longer historical shadows have fallen across the Middle East than this reference to an
One-term federal governments in Australia are rare. The most recent — led by Labor’s James Scullin in 1931 — was one of the many victims (political and otherwise) of the Great Depression. That’s the good news for Anthony Albanese. Closer to the present day, though, Labor was forced into minority
Just a few days before Christmas 2023 the federal government announced a tough new vehicle efficiency standard for motor vehicles. The standard — which would belatedly have brought Australia into line with most other advanced economies — encountered predictable opposition from Peter Dutton and his Coalition colleagues and from affected
Just a few days before Christmas 2023 the federal government announced a tough new vehicle efficiency standard for motor vehicles. The standard — which would belatedly have brought Australia into line with most other advanced economies — encountered predictable opposition from Peter Dutton and his Coalition colleagues and from affected
If he wasn’t already a hard man when he was jailed, Yahya Sinwar was a very hard man by the time he walked out of an Israeli prison in 2011. A beneficiary of a prisoner–hostage swap, he had closely observed his Israeli guards during his twenty years of imprisonment and
Should residents of the most populous Australian city of the late-Victorian age, a status it would reclaim only in the far distant 2020s, take a bow — or should they blush? In early 1888, James Malley, formerly of Kansas and points further east, was in a proper fix. Acquitted years
In its third year, the Ukraine war has changed much, even as it keeps changing. It proclaims that the old international order is broken. How it unfolds and how it ends will say much about what new order, or disorder, is emerging. Important history keeps arriving: Russia’s initial arrogance and
In April 2019 hopes were running high in US progressive circles, with the left-wing “Squad” making its presence felt within the Democratic congressional majority and Bernie Sanders launching his second presidential campaign. Universal healthcare and tuition-free universities had returned to the realm of political possibilities, joined now by the Green
In my usual manner, I began this book by reading the conclusion. There, Susannah Gibson closes her new book on eighteenth-century intellectual women, The Bluestockings, by quoting Virginia Woolf. “It is the masculine values that prevail,” Woolf rued in 1928. “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it
As he describes them in his newly published memoir, Ron Boswell: Not Pretty, But Pretty Effective, Ron Boswell’s early years in Perth were not happy. His mother, “something of a drifter and subject to Bohemian influences,” was ill-matched with his father, “a devout and practising Roman Catholic with a conservative
Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo examines four works of postwar musical commemoration created respectively by a German, an Austrian Jew in exile, an Englishman and a Russian: Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen (1945), Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1962) and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No 13 (1962). Although
