Lawyers

Geoffrey Robertson’s Life in the Law

Knight in Shining Armani

By Paola Totaro

Robertson has 13 books under his belt, among them The Tyrannicide Brief (2005), the story of John Cooke, the lawyer who prosecuted King Charles I in the treason trial that led to his execution. David Williamson and Robertson are now collaborating on turning the book into a play. Most recently, last year – on the eve of the first papal visit to the UK in nearly 30 years – Robertson publish

Olivier Assayas’ 'Carlos' and Terrorists in Film

Paths of Glory

By Kate Jennings

Every road leads to a reckoning. In Olivier Assayas’ movie Carlos, the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez – AKA Carlos the Jackal – meets his reckoning not when he is finally kidnapped in Khartoum in 1994 and taken back to France to be imprisoned for killing police officers but when he is standing in front of a class of puzzled Sudanese soldiers teaching them guerrilla tactics

Our Intelligence Services

Hidden Agendas

By Sally Neighbour

This grand edifice is to be the new home of Australia’s premier spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). Costed at a staggering $585 million, the building has been called a “monster” by the architect of Parliament House. Yet it’s a fitting abode for an organisation that has grown over the past decade into one of the most powerful government bodies in the land – its staff numbers trebled, its budget

Kimberley Politics

Dividing the Territory

By Victoria Laurie

A saronged camper points to where he paddled his kayak out earlier to greet the whales. Another man has scrambled up the orange pindan cliffs and stands watching; he and his partner are anthropologists who have worked in the Kimberley for years. “We thought we’d camp here for a week – before it all changes,” he says, eyeing a boat that is trawling up

Duty of Care

By Margaret Simons

Pluck an episode from the midstream of human life and it can be hard to glean meaning. Sometimes there is just senselessness and mess. If there is a theme to the events that have interrupted these women’s lives, however, it is surely care, and its opposite,

From Berlin to the Bush

By Ken Inglis

After eight weeks at sea, the internees were disembarked: some in Melbourne, en route to a camp in Tatura, in northern Victoria, but most in Sydney, where they were then taken on a 19-hour train journey to the town of Hay and marched into two camps. There the

Fire Walk with Me

By Paul Barry

The fictional version would have been far more fun: a factory burnt down to claim the insurance, politicians and businessmen cashing in on the scam, a suicidal stockbroker spilling Swiss bank secrets, and a beautiful girl thrown to her death to prevent her from talking.

The Hard Stuff

By Malcolm Knox

It was a recession; that’s my excuse. A friend got me a job interview with the world’s second-biggest management consultancy. A man and a woman sat me down in a conference room. They seemed barely older than me, children somehow left in charge of the shop.

The Methadone Program at 40

Liquid Handcuffs

By Gail Bell

Two old hands who dose at the pharmacy where I work (a couple, Danny and Carla) have been using since they were 18. They are in their forties now, have raised their kids (the eldest is at university), and keep a neat house in the suburbs. This is their third go at metha

Coe & Co.

By Paul Barry

Coe’s best mate, Gordon Fell, is just as bright and another paragon of virtue. The former Rhodes scholar, who made his millions selling property to super-fund investors, was a director of the Smith Family, chairman of Opera Australia and a trustee of Sydney

King Coal

By Guy Pearse

Glenn’s castle is not his house, but the public garden and war memorial into which his parents poured so much time and effort. “Mum had enormous empathy for our servicemen. A dressmaker during the war, she spent many mornings sewing military colours onto u

Harry Kakavas and Problem Gamblers

The Biggest Loser

By Paul Barry

This occurred in November 2004, shortly after Kakavas was spotted at the tables in Las Vegas by Kerry Packer, who rang Crown’s chief operating officer, John Williams (son of Lloyd, the casino’s founder), to ask why Kakavas wasn’t losing his money in Melbourne inst

Bill of Rights

Comment

By Geoffrey Robertson

The most remarkable feature of the National Human Rights Consultation Report, released last month, is its projection of the voices of ‘ordinary people’ (a condescending phrase used by lawyers to describe people who are not lawyers). These voices are alternatively laconic, passionate, revelatory and querulous, all dialogue guaranteed verbatim, as heard by

A Short History of the Media Future

Mash-up

By John Birmingham

The formal library, in contrast, has none of this. Occupying the centre of the original house, its one nod to modernity is a rather groovy white lampshade hanging in the centre of the room. The vast and intricate web of optical fibre and wiring, which forms a sort of nervous system for the rest of the house, courses around this one space like water around a rock. Previously, it had been little mor

Robert G Kaiser’s ‘So Damn Much Money’

Revolving Doors

By Guy Pearse

Life in a Bangkok Prison

The King & I

By Harry Nicolaides

Compound One. For weeks I lay on my back, delirious with influenza. When I was able to stand, I shuffled around like a zombie, pushed here and there by the heaving population of sweaty, half-naked inmates, most of them Thai, Burmese or Cambodian.One night I wa

Life in a Bangkok Prison

The King & I [preview]

By Harry Nicolaides

'Outliers: The Story of Success' by Malcolm Gladwell

By Zora Simic

Perhaps by virtue of his own accomplishments, Malcolm Gladwell - author of bestsellers The Tipping Point and Blink, writer for the New Yorker, and well-paid speaker and guru - has a vested interest in the topic of success. Yet, in publicity for his latest book, Gladwell has resisted calling himself an outlier, formally defined as "something that is situated away from or classed differently from a