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Keywords: George Orwell

  • AUSTRALIA

    Humiliating Gbagbo

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 14 April 2011

    Journalistic accounts of the defeat of Ivory Coast's Laurent Koudou Gbagbo seem to contain an unhealthy note of gloating. The Ghana Business News shows a more modest creature who posted his impressions on Twitter even as the crisis was unfolding. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australian politics could use a dash of vitriol

    • Edwina Byrne
    • 20 January 2011
    16 Comments

    The speeches of the Tea Party movement, for all their faults, are notable for their vivid symbolism and appeal to values. When was the last time you heard an Australian politician invent their own intelligible metaphor?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Escaping Oprah and Christmas

    • Brian Matthews
    • 10 December 2010
    2 Comments

    'Apodemialgia' is the opposite of nostaligia: a desire to escape. Add the brash, McDonald's-sponsored presence of Oprah to the pleasant but undeniably testing rigours of Christmas and apodemialgics all over the country will be reaching for something stronger than McCoffee. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Swimming in ink

    • Vin Maskell
    • 17 November 2010
    7 Comments

    He is out there, a fellow water man, in the real dark, in the blue-black ink. I am just here in the shallows, for I am not a swimmer. I can neither see him nor hear him but know he is there because his bike and his clothes are in their usual spot by the footpath.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ode to my mechanic

    • Sasha Shtargot
    • 04 August 2010
    4 Comments

    You don't get many words out of him, and when he does speak they always end in a question. 'It's gonna cost a lot to get new tyres, knowata mean? You're better off getting re-treads, knowata mean?' In our society there are hundreds of jobs that barely rate a mention, and armies of unsung workers who keep it functioning and well-oiled.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Gloves off for climate crunch

    • John Wicks
    • 18 September 2009
    6 Comments

    Some will be concerned by the black and white treatment of climate change in Tony Kevin's book. There is common ground now to generate significant policy changes with a focus on wellbeing, even while the CO2 debate continues to rage.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Economists and other prophets

    • Brian Matthews
    • 12 August 2009
    3 Comments

    Economists are often, sometimes spectacularly, wrong. But like all prophets, they are unabashed by and unpunished for abject failures. They pop up from each new set of ruins, surprised yet unrepentant, princes of a plethora of evanescent predictions.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Shakespeare and the F word

    • Brian Matthews
    • 13 May 2009

    If Shakespeare had dabbled in cuisine, dishes such as 'eye of newt' and 'fillet of fenny snake' may have been a sensation. As the first 'foody' to emerge from the obscurity of Stratford-upon-Avon, he would have an unlikely successor: Gordon Ramsay.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The human face of a 'metaphorical' poet

    • Garry Kinnane
    • 04 March 2009
    6 Comments

    In 1972 Auden abandoned New York to live at Christ Church College, Oxford. He was given a cottage in the grounds, and was expected to give occasional talks and be available to students. It turned out not to be the success everyone had hoped for.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Unlikely (big) brothers in arms

    • Alexandra Coghlan
    • 19 September 2008
    1 Comment

    George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh occupied opposing aesthetic, philosophical and political poles. This conceptually agile book suggests they attained moral — if not spiritual — agreement from fundamentally opposing directions.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    'Bumbling' Karadzic faces political justice

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 24 July 2008

    One of the vices of nationalism is the symptom of long memory. Punishing accused war criminal Radovan Karadzic will do little to convince those who are set in their positions — Bosnia's Muslims will feel vindicated, but Bosnian Serbs are simply weary.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    'Don't be evil' a struggle for Google

    • James Massola
    • 05 September 2007
    5 Comments

    Channel 7's purchase of AFL players' medical records has highlighted privacy concerns. Most users of Google are not aware of the extent to which it compromises their privacy.

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