By this author
’Montebello’ by Robert Drewe
Memoir
On the day in 1952 that Britain detonated the first of three atomic bombs off the Pilbara coast, Robert Drewe was in a Perth phone box, begging a late-pass from his mother. He was nine; his mother was anxious. “Atom bombs worry the blazes out of me, …
’HHhH’ by Laurent Binet
Books
Not too many first novels come at you like this one. Laurent Binet’s debut, based on the true story of the British and Czech mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Nazi secret services, in Prague in 1942, is virtuosic, combative …
’The Dinner’ by Herman Koch
Books
When Serge Lohman, the Netherlands’ favourite candidate for prime minister, dines at an exclusive restaurant with his younger brother Paul, we know there’s scrofulous business ahead in Herman Koch’s grim and perturbing novel, The Dinner. …
All Frocked Up
Grace Kelly’s Gowns in Bendigo
Across the Great Divide
Education
Public versus Private Schools
Jewel of Melbourne
Culture
If ever I’ve been in Melbourne’s CBD and gripped by a raging depression there – the sight of the city’s lonesome downtown mall can do it to me, with its pavement guitarists dedicating themselves to another decade of distorted flamenco music and …
Links
Society
Every evening before dinner, I escort my infinitely forbearing dog out of the house and into the world on his nightly constitutional. Lance and I don’t walk where we should, which is to say the closest neighbouring parkland. That’s been intruded upon …
Jet lag
arts
Martha Solburn, an American woman, plump and unaccustomed to vacations, eased herself out of a taxi into the late-August morning. Her companion, Stewart Winter, adjusted the seat of his jeans and followed, wheeling a new Samsonite suitcase. “I’d …
