Category: Quadrant

Dismiss it as a midnight reverie, if you will,  this dream of mine that pictured a Prime Minister more a’feared of squandering Australia’s potential and prosperity than of irritating the ABC and  greenish Wets within his own party. With such a vision still fresh, I abandoned the warm fug of

Not so long ago, I was watching a television climate “expert” talking, as they all do, about “unprecedented warming.” As proof of this he stood, arms outstretched, in one of the vineyards springing up across southern Britain. Look, everyone, the temperatures have risen so much that it is now possible

The most frequent question I have received over the last month is “who is to blame for the bushfire mess up and down the east coast?” There is a school of thought, mostly put about by state premiers, that the blame game is bad form. We should put the whole

Republicans come sniffing around at the hint of a royal scandal. I note that even the editorial writer at The Australian (whoever he or she is) takes the opportunity to flog the comatose horse again. I will make it clear. Being of English birth, and being an English royalist, I

I have been astonished at the reaction of the Twitter mob to the latest development in the Bruce Pascoe Affair.  Astonished but not surprised, if you can appreciate the subtlety of this apparent paradox.  I am astonished that so many people, many not obviously cretins (pathologically at least), can so

We have lost one of the great conservative Rogers, far too early at what has now come to be regarded as the young age of seventy-five.  Sir Roger Scruton’s passing has occurred, too, merely days after we lost Gertrude Himmelfarb (aka Mrs Irving Kristol), another conservative giant of the late

The Victorian government intends to pass a law very soon that may see ordinary citizens imprisoned if they speak up against the chemical, psychological and physical mutilation of confused adolescents. Labor Attorney-General-Hennessey wants to outlaw conversion practices. They are defined in her discussion paper about the proposed Bill as …any

It was Paris, May 1968 (above), when Roger Scruton saw into the heart of darkness. He then began an intellectual odyssey that largely defined modern conservatism but came to an end with his passing on the 12 January, 2020. It began as he witnessed the student rebellion erupting in “the

The first time I took note of Roger Scruton was during the Margaret Thatcher years. It was between my Marxist youth and my un-Marxist adulthood. Scruton, the UK’s most prominent conservative philosopher at the time, sounded, to my ears, as if he were damning with faint praise the economic policies,

As the New Year dawned, the future of the House of Windsor looked so assured. This was captured in the image, released by the Palace, of the Sovereign and her three heirs – quietly, confidently looking not just towards the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in  2022 but, into the fourth generation,

With the eastern seaboard currently ravaged by bushfires, what sort of an idiot would actually cheer when one worked its way down the peninsular where he lived? I did, and there were a lot of others who did the same. To understand why, we must go back over more than

Wall was a squatter and a hard man. There had been long years of drought and loss, and then came the rabbit pest—the rabbits swarmed like flies over his run, and cropped the ground bare where even the poor grass might have saved thousands of sheep—and the rabbits cost the