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Keywords: Robert Hughes

  • AUSTRALIA

    Requiem in a dawn light

    • Peter Craven
    • 24 April 2024

    For those born in the wake of World War II, war stories seemed the greatest fun on earth. But the pity of it is monumental and we come to take it – if not for granted – then at least as part of the fabric of minds that had met with all that was terrible in human experience and all that called out for reverence.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    To be Frank: In conversation with Catharine Lumby

    • Barry Gittins
    • 24 November 2023

    Catharine Lumby was a friend and beneficiary of Moorhouse’s mentoring and advice, and before his death, was approached by him to write a warts-and-all uncensored biography. In Frank Moorhouse: A Life, Lumby explores the life of this man of letters in all of its colour and contradiction. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Cults, crimes and coercive control: The Running Grave

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 13 October 2023
    1 Comment

    An intricate tale that delves deep into the realm of cults, deception, and the human psyche, The Running Grave goes beyond a mere detective yarn, with a narrative that confronts society's susceptibility to manipulation and questions the very fabric of our beliefs. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    We don't know ourselves: A personal history of Ireland

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 07 July 2023
    1 Comment

    Comparing perspectives from different generations of Irish writers, Fintan O'Toole explores the weight of Ireland's 'lovely past', its unaddressed traumas, and their impact on the present. Addressing themes of change, politics, and religion, his narrative offers an unflinching exploration of the Emerald Isle's history.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    New heresy: In conversation with Richard Dawkins

    • David Halliday, Juliette Hughes
    • 03 March 2023
    2 Comments

    In the world of science and rational inquiry, few names loom as large. The often-controversial evolutionary biologist has spent decades exploring the mysteries of the natural world and ruffling feathers in religious and secular movements alike. Speaking to Eureka Street, Richard Dawkins discusses the difficulties in public discourse and what constitutes modern heresy.  

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Albanese reset: Stopping boats while treating onshore asylum seekers decently

    • Frank Brennan
    • 28 October 2022
    6 Comments

    In recent years, Australian policies in relation to asylum seekers and refugees have been unnecessarily mean, cruel and disorganised. The election of the Albanese government provides the opportunity for a reset, putting behind us the past mistakes of both Coalition and Labor Governments in the last 20 years.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A moral compass at the centre of J.K. Rowling's Ink Black Heart

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 07 September 2022
    4 Comments

    So far it hasn’t been easy to find a review in Australia from someone who has actually read the sixth and latest book in Rowling/Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike crime series, The Ink Black Heart. l wonder if it is too much to ask for people to simply read books (any books) before holding opinions about them.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Memory and Austen

    • Juliette Hughes 
    • 14 July 2022
    4 Comments

    History is on my mind at the moment, all because of yet another awful Austen adaptation. The latest cinematic mud-pie thrown at her in the new Persuasion movie may even be the worst one yet, which is something, because there’s a lot of competition. Who can forget Gwyneth Paltrow in the 1995 Emma driving a carriage in a yellow ball gown as though she were doing the time trial in Top Gear?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Going big picture with Malcolm Turnbull

    • Barry Gittins
    • 22 May 2020
    17 Comments

    As the small-l Liberal who attempted unsuccessfully to stare down the right-wing of the Liberal Party, known to his enemies as ‘Mr Harbourside Mansion’ or as the best Labour Prime Minister to ever lead the Liberal Party (2015-2018), Malcolm Bligh Turnbull was a man who dreamed, spoke and spent big.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Bob Ellis the gifted troublemaker

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 05 April 2016
    7 Comments

    Ellis' work is a prime example of the notion advanced by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: that committed literature, and the act of writing, are political and ethical acts. Even in a film script, one can ponder social political change. Always of the left, but never formally the structured party man of faction and following, the dishevelled, sometimes wild Ellis proved contrarian even to Labor stalwarts. There were never pious reflections, or unqualified praises.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Election year food, sex and meaning

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 08 February 2013

    David Marr's withering piece on Tony Abbot completes the political trinity. These writers manage the impossible: they have me feeling sorry for politicians. Well, almost. I'm not sure if such magnanimity is allowed in an election year. But what a pleasure to discover those grey Canberran corridors harbouring such a chiaroscuro of emotion.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Robert Hughes, the Australian exile who never left

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 09 August 2012
    3 Comments

    Hughes was part of that movement of Australian artists and intellectuals — Germaine Greer and Clive James among them — who fled to Europe in the 1960s. Yet he was unable to escape the antipodean orbit he found arid and constricting. Australian reference points followed his pen with nagging persistence, a permanent shadowing.

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