Keywords: Winston Churchill
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- 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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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 22 October 2020
11 Comments
In the choppy waters of public conversation, rulers have recently attracted much attention as they have bobbed along on its surface. This is not unusual, but in these months the attention has been more frenetic and perhaps harder to read. Whether it be Trump, Johnson, Andrews, Ardern, Berejiklian or Pope Francis, there have been unusual eddies about them that merit reflection.
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AUSTRALIA
- Abigail Lewis
- 23 April 2020
6 Comments
It would seem that many of us, on all sides of politics, agree that evicting someone from their home because an emergency circumstance beyond their control has affected their ability to pay their rent on time is morally questionable at best. And yet, before COVID-19, this was something we allowed to happen all the time.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Jeff Sparrow
- 09 December 2019
29 Comments
If the dark days of 1940 provided an opportunity for a chancer and publicity hound like Winston Churchill to emerge as an inspirational leader and reputed giant of the 20th century, why hasn't the catastrophic breakdown of the natural world done something similar for the likes of Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Scott Morrison?
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AUSTRALIA
- Barry Gittins
- 20 September 2018
6 Comments
How best to extract them from their cozy dens? Whispering endearments and professions of love does not produce the desired results. Nor does opening curtains, turning on the lights, singing annoying songs, turning on a television or radio, or serenading them on a tuba. These strategies have all been unsuccessfully trialled.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 01 March 2017
18 Comments
It is a commonplace that our political discourse is much impoverished. Speeches are built around sound bites. The Trump administration is experimenting with letting go of speeches and communicating within the limits set by Twitter. In such a world there is little space for more complex rhetoric, for cultural reference, for reflection on historical precedents, or for wondering. Our politicians' words leave no echoes. It is worth musing on what may be lost in the thinning of public discourse.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 27 September 2012
2 Comments
The book is essentially misogynistic. Women are objects of hedonistic possibilities in the same way that drugs are. Even the Kerouac figure Sal's self-deprecating account of failing to impress a virginal lover manages to marginalise the woman in question. The film seeks to rectify this by giving flesh to its female characters.
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AUSTRALIA
- Binoy Kampmark
- 22 August 2011
8 Comments
Walls are not merely concrete manifestations but cultural and psychological ones. One East Berlin native recalled his mother 'cried for hours when the Wall fell'. Israel, in constructing a wall around Jerusalem, faced a host of issues as complex as those that faced East Germany.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
To attempt, to begin, is really to dream, to envision, to speculate, and then to work like a burro to implement, to create, to make real. How is it that a word like entrepreneurship, which means vast and amazing things, has become so commonplace and thin?
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AUSTRALIA
- Moira Rayner
- 18 January 2011
22 Comments
I am bloody tired of journalists comparing one woman against another, as if there were a competition to find the 'real' woman leader, a winner and losers. That isn't how women tend to use power: it can be shared, and used for the common good. We saw Bligh and Gillard doing it, and didn't get it.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
Went to return a book the other day and it refused to go
in the BOOKS ONLY slot. I tried again, thinking
perhaps I had suddenly aged beyond belief and could not muster the
muscle to cram it through the wall, but no, it was the book itself,
adamant, recalcitrant, bristling and ruffling indignantly, that would
not allow itself to be returned.
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RELIGION
- Yannick Thoraval
- 14 December 2009
8 Comments
When the Dalai Lama appeared, people flocked to
the stage, mobile phone cameras in hand, so
they too could own a piece of the Dalai Lama. As a measure of our cultural values, it is interesting to consider that the Dalai Lama has become a commodity.
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