Politicians are “born actors,” their performances “implicated in the projection of political power,” says the historian Graeme Davison. He’s quoted early in Performance Politics, Joshua Black’s ...

For the modern reader, the suggestion that a special sympathy exists between Catholic religious teaching and Labor’s values and outlook might seem implausible. Jeff Kildea’s impressive new book, Iron ...

With just four weeks to go until the US midterm elections a “blue wave” — or what Australians would call a Democratic landslide — seems likely. The Democrats are eight points ahead in national polls ...

In Magnum Streetwise, Stephen McLaren distils and celebrates what many would regard as the most significant movement in postwar documentary photography. He brings together examples of the work of ...

In the early 1960s, contentious talk about the injustices of the British class system was part of the stock-in-trade of Manchester pubs. Most of the talk was washed away by pints of Watney’s Red ...

In 1925 the Commonwealth statistician Charles Wickens, himself the son of migrant parents, likened Australia’s approach to immigration to a boa constrictor and its food. “We are in the habit of ...

Three hours into last Friday’s hearing of the parliamentary inquiry examining artificial intelligence, Nationals senator Ross Cadell asked a straightforward question about copyright. The answer he ...

A few days ago I spent some an hour on the phone with a friend in Gaza. Before the war, our conversations were a kind of luxury. He was a director-general in one of the Palestinian Authority’s ...

Are you at a very Chinese time in your life? Or is there more to “becoming Chinese” than buying a Labubu doll, drinking warm water, hopping into a BYD electric car or even joining a group of Chinese ...

Will the Australian parliament ever debate AUKUS? The latest opportunity came up in April this year, when the Albanese government released its latest National Defence Strategy; its text is yet to be ...

Tom Griffiths was fourteen when he came across a book by Alice Duncan-Kemp in his school library. “The dusty volume was sitting unobtrusively on a shelf of ‘Australiana’,” he recalls, but it looked ...

Language watchers will have noticed the rise of therapy-speak. Boundaries must be maintained, space must be held, gaslighting must be called out, and triggers, traumas and diagnostic terms abound. The ...