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Researchers into olfactory memory, that curious nostalgia of the nose, have put it all down to the limbic system. I have read but cannot always parse the literature: the academics tend to lose me at the orbitofrontal cortex. But the
It was one of those stories that I sometimes pitched to make sure that I had money coming in: a throwaway that meant nothing to me, but which was curious enough that an online magazine would run it in return
This is not one of those Canberra stories that begins with a body in Lake Burley Griffin. That might strike the reader as a shame. The lake seems like a good place for a body, as well as for a
When Anita Anand and William Dalrymple sat down to discuss making a podcast together, there was never really any question what it was going to be about. “I knew at once that it had to be about empire,” Anand, a
In 2009, when I interviewed Christopher Hitchens in anticipation of his appearance at the inaugural Festival of Dangerous Ideas, I used our last ten minutes together to ask his opinion of, among other things, Australian journalist John Pilger. “I remember
I was always going to like Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain. I was predisposed to like it. Anyone who devoured Bourdain’s work, and who still hasn’t quite gotten over his 2018 death, was predisposed to like it.
Colin Thubron’s The Amur River begins with the Mongolian authorities warning him that his trip is ill-advised. They’re talking specifically about his plan to enter the country’s rugged Khentii Mountains on horseback, though what he has in mind is much
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, a thread. I put it to you that a great rabble of opinion writers, especially on the right, in the interest of criticising Australia’s lockdown policies, have magically and mindlessly transformed Sir Peter Ustinov