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Author: Juliette Hughes

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The Rings of Power: Flawed jewels

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 19 September 2024

    The latest series of The Rings of Power is a real curate’s egg. Whether having some bits that are good among other bits that are on the nose is a conundrum that this viewer must sort out for herself. Do the bad bits ruin the whole thing?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    How 'Slow Horses' became the show of the moment

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 12 September 2024

    Slow Horses is one of those dramas that are even better than the books they’re based on. The TV series is blessed by having Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, the grisly spy-genius with a preternatural instinct for sniffing out hidden agendas. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    TV cops and cop-outs

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 29 August 2024

    With contemporary crime dramas increasingly suffused with a sense of grim fatalism, The Rookie stands out for its optimism, a refreshing throwback to the days when crime series used to be about the mostly goodies chasing the mostly baddies.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Olympic ceremonies as liturgies

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 07 August 2024

    You have to admit, the French have form for mocking religion. But with their peculiar take on the Lord's Supper with all its Dionysian excess, the colourfully irreverent opening ceremony left many asking: has Paris 2024 turned the Olympics into a ritual of performative ethics? 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    All the deadly women

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 12 July 2024

    Are women truly the villains that modern crime dramas portray them to be? Despite the sensationalised 'evil woman' trope, real-life statistics tell a different story. It’s a cruel irony that the way to really victimise a woman is to tell her that she is the perp when she really is overwhelmingly more likely to be the victim of violent crime.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Uncle George’s war

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 21 June 2024

    Most soldiers don’t like to talk about what they’ve been through, the things they’ve had to see; the things they’ve had to do. Uncle George was more willing to talk as he got older and more willing to be coaxed by a crowd of adoring nieces. But there were some things he'd never say. And the war never went away from him.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Terry Pratchett and the nuclear energy debate

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 05 June 2024

    Since Peter Dutton has reignited the appetite for the dream of unlimited energy from atom-splitting, we have to think about the risks again. Is it more dangerous to keep burning coal and gas and oil and boil the planet than to have a few Chernobyls or Windscales? How do we balance such risks?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Please, not Bridgerton again

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 17 May 2024

    What can you say when faced by another season of Bridgerton – that posing, poncing, irony-defying travesty of all history, literature and human relationships? Bridgerton took the Barbara Cartland romance/mild erotica ethos and dumbed it down to fifty shades of fluorescent polyester.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Searching for the truth about a wartime massacre

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 15 March 2024
    3 Comments

    Two books about a 1942 massacre of Australian nurses were released last year. One is reliable, the other is notable for factual omissions. If we leave something out, are we then guilty of censorship? Alternatively, if our truth-telling offends someone else, what is our justification for so doing?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    End of year thoughts in the Endarkenment 2023

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 20 December 2023

    It’s becoming an age of Endarkenment. Was it ever thus? So many going mad with one half of the facts? Moved by ignorance and targeted misinformation, compassion becomes corrupted into a rage for vengeance, and our streets heave with mobs who chant hate. It’s made me worried and sad. But I won’t give up on Christmas.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The day John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 22 November 2023
    1 Comment

    Sixty years ago today, on November 22, 1963, the world lost three towering figures of the 20th century. On their diamond jubilee, do I think it was the end of the world as we know it when these three died? Each one shaped the twentieth century in a unique way. Each one left us with much to think about still.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The burden of hope in Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 17 November 2023

    Stone Yard Devotional is a chronicle of a huge problem in our time: the sense of futility in all our efforts to amend. Wood may make us think, because despair is a constant stalker of the bravest of warriors against the destruction of the planet and the chronic toll of human evil. When compassion becomes a disabling burden, who or what can help?   

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