So you thought the spectacle was just smoke and mirrors? Is that why you’re shocked? You didn’t think I would do anything?

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In 1985, Helen Garner picked up the Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature in a bookshop in Melbourne and examined its index to confirm that she was not in it. On finding she was right, she felt ...

John XXIII, the pope who initiated the council in 1962, described it as an aggiornamento, a ‘bringing up to date’, an attempt ...

In the more fortunate and vastly different condition of life under civil government, the ideal of independence had become a ...

Wadi el-Jarf lies two hundred kilometres south-east of Cairo on a pristine stretch of the Red Sea coast. It dates from the time of the pharaoh Sneferu, the father of Khufu, builder of the Great ...

My former colleague Nicholas Mostyn writes gloomily that ‘we will likely lose speech, mobility and continence and be beset by ...

Mussorgsky’s alcoholism caught up with him before he could finish Khovanshchina. At the time of his death in 1881 ...

Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7 (2022) has an opening line that’s hard to beat: ‘This is gonna be my stupidest death ever.’ The speaker is lying in an ice-encrusted cave ...

Classic’ may not be quite the right word for this scary, messy film – it’s about forms of rage that don’t ...