George W Bush

Fred Schepisi & Vladimir Putin

By Shane Maloney

As Fred Schepisi was whisked along the Rublyovka highway, past luxury car showrooms and Gucci boutiques, he reflected on how much Moscow had changed in the 18 years since he’d last seen it. Back then, Mikhail Gorbachev occupied the Kremlin, the USSR was a superpower and, despite the promise of perestroika, drab lines of people still waited outside shops. On that occasion, he was there to di

Republicans and the US Presidential Race

Angry Boys

By Julia Baird

The Family Table Restaurant is a small, dingy diner in Atlantic, Iowa, the state known as the Hawkeye State, that claims to be the corn capital of the world. It sits opposite a gas station on a road leading through acres of cornfields, now razed to bristly rows and pale with frost, in what has been an unseasonably warm winter. Occasionally, people passing through pause to fill up on spicy ham

Comment: Palin Politics and the Tea Party

By Don Watson

The fact of the automobile for instance; and Big Oil, which fuelled it; and the strip malls, which made the car indispensable to commerce, including commerce in food; and agribusiness, which made the greater part of United States farming a state-subsidised vertically integrated corporate industry and an alarmingly large number of American citizens obese. Those lines etched in the ice were the sinews of power and influence, though a grea

Jennifer Maiden - 'Friendly Fire', 2005

Poetry Masterpiece

By Lisa Gorton

Jennifer Maiden’s fourteenth poetry collection is a masterpiece in the original sense of that word: fantastical, intelligent, unassuming and conversational, it gives full expression to her talent. In this collection, there are few borrowed or conventional elements; to a remarkable degree, the style of these poems expresses her particular vision. Maiden tak

George W Bush & John Newcombe

By Shane Maloney

For the Bushes, tennis was the family game, like touch football had been for the Kennedys. Olympic players and Davis Cup captains fed the Bush bloodline. George HW Bush was no slouch with a racket and could always find time between diplomatic, CIA and vice-pre

From the Chrysalis

By Don Watson

FIRST PUBLISHED IN JUNE 2010. It was a bad night for neo-cons, neo-liberals and neo-Hobbesians, the last being those wiseacres in and around the now-crumbled Bush administration who had been inclined to justify the “muscular unilateralism” of recent Americ

Christopher Hitchens’ 'Hitch-22'

Swinger

By Dennis Altman

At one point in Hitch-22: A Memoir (Atlantic Books, 352pp; $35.00) Christopher Hitchens writes: “As 1968 began to ebb into 1969 … people began to intone the words: ‘The personal is political’. At the instant I heard this deadly expression I knew … that it was

Strictly Speaking

By Alan Saunders

“I’m not going to bore you with a lot of oratory, because I’m not an orator,” Sir Les Patterson once remarked. “I’m an Australian politician.” He was unfair to his breed and to his country as well. Australia’s reputation for tongue-tied inartic

Peter Carey's 'Parrot and Olivier in America'

Sub-prime

By Philip Hensher

Peter Carey said a decade ago: “My fictional project has always been the invention or discovery of my own country.” Whatever place he meant by those last three words may now have shifted. Oscar and Lucinda (1988), True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) and My Life as

Arundhati Roy's "Listening to Grasshoppers"

Feral Howl

By Tim Soutphommasane

As a schoolboy in Sydney, I found that my summertime lessons would inevitably be drowned out by the clicking of cicadas. Many find the sound of cicadas somewhat soothing, but for me it was always an unbearable cacophony. Cicadas aren’t the same creatures, I

The 53rd Venice Biennale

A Matter of Taste

By Sebastian Smee

Homer’s "Iliad" & David Malouf’s "Ransom"

Troy Revisited

By Peter Conrad

Which of Homer's two narratives a writer chooses depends on the temper of the times. Romantic voyagers in the nineteenth century favoured The Odyssey. Goethe, visiting an aromatic garden in Sicily, said that for the first time the poem had become a "living truth" to him

Oliver Stone’s 'W'

Big Thoughts, Empire Burlesque

By Luke Davies

"The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages." So wrote the editors of the New Yorker recently, before clarifying: "The Presidency of George W Bush is the worst since Reconstruction." In an unusually partisan collective editorial published before the American election, they went on to elucidate, over several pages, the litany of erosio

Getting Elected in Zanesville, Ohio

Once Upon a Time in America

By Don Watson

The people who built the interstate highways in the 1950s might have done worse to Zanesville: they might have put it right through the centre of town. They could have knocked over the magnificent old four-storey courthouse and straddled the spires of the churches. They could have run the pylons right down Main Street and the Y Bridge and, who knows, they might have if the hills on either side of

The Work of David Foster Wallace

Everything & More

By Malcolm Knox

The outcome, after some interrogation and cross-referencing, was a relationship with the writing of David Foster Wallace that has been life-changing, albeit less so than for Steve Beeson, whose life was literally changed by Wallace's 1996 novel, Infinite J

Annie Proulx’s ‘Fine Just the Way It Is’

Unhappy Endings

By Amanda Lohrey

The celebrated American writer Annie Proulx is now in her seventies, and it's possible to look back on her impressive list of publications and identify two distinct genres at work. The first of these is the comic novel of baroque folksiness that documents the

Patrick Cockburn’s ‘Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq’

The Bigger Devil

By Tony Clifton

Soon after America's army had invaded Iraq and overthrown Saddam Hussein, an obscure Iraqi Muslim cleric was asked what he thought had just happened. Instead of exulting in the fall of a dictator who had almost exterminated his family, the 30-year-old Muqtada al-Sadr to

Train I Ride

By Delia Falconer

On YouTube, someone has posted a lovely compilation of the many train sequences in Yasujiro Ozu's films. Looking at this clip, you realise how well the director was able to use these dreamy but plainly framed shots as markers of time itself - of its gentle surety - within his stories. Only Japan's national railways, it seems, have retained their aura of enchantment in the twenty-first century, con