Mandolin & Mussolini

Louis de Bernières’s book Captain Corelli’s Mandolin sold well in the day and prompted a movie with Nicholas Cage and … More

International Women’s Day

Recently in Hawaii your eagle-eyed correspondent discovered on a wall in a humble abode this ironic (iconic?) reference to a … More

Peter Carey conjures up a racy ethos and mood in early 1950s suburban Melbourne in his recent novel ‘A Long … More

A best seller by Israeli historian Yuval Harari, sold 10 million copies, translated into 50 languages, it’s unequivocally a must-read. … More

So, the ‘iconic’ (obligatory adjective) Sydney Opera House is our biggest billboard, so sayeth PM Scott Morrison aka ScoMo, endorsing … More

Despite colonial Van Demonian (oh yeah!) attempts to exterminate its aborigines in the 1820-30s, it seems that the extant Tasmanian … More

The mind-bending Trumpian world operates in a bulletproof moral and factual vacuum, which has made sarcasm and irony, my tools … More

Tim Cope is an Australian adventurer who made a remarkable solo trip by horseback from Mongolia to Hungary over a … More

My friend Clare gave me an endurance test with the gift of this 866 page novel by Paul Auster, about … More

(French, present participle of revenir, to return – when used in English curiously it is more dramatic, from the dead, like the … More