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It never does one well to declare a genre dead. It may grow stale, may ossify like bone, it may even seem to fade from view. But genres have a tendency to regenerate, too: the Western, for example, rides back
From the very first episode of FX’s The Americans, the sixth and final season of which began airing last month, it was clear that the show was going to be something special. Perhaps it was seeing Keri Russell, who once
The international release of Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin was attended by two fitting ironies. The first was that Vladimir Putin’s Russia—after this month’s election result, it remains undoubtedly his—banned it outright on the grounds of its “extremism”. (Yelena
While McCarthyism has long been a go-to for American writers, the same cannot really be said of the Australian equivalent, the Petrov affair. It has been a decade since Andrew Croome’s Document Z. Mick McCoy’s What the Light Reveals is
It is a truth universally acknowledged—well, acknowledged by everyone but the man himself—that Donald Trump is obsessed with the news media and its coverage of him. Among US presidents, only Richard Nixon has hated the media more, or been more
The following book reviews were written for The Weekend Australian back in 2016. For whatever reason — probably the fact that I didn’t file them on time — they were never published. I’m putting them out there now for posterity’s sake. From the review
When George MacDonald Fraser sat down to pen Flashman, the first volume of what would eventually become a thirteen-book series known as ‘The Flashman Papers’, one doubts he knew how enduring his titular character would become. A minor figure in Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s
I didn’t know much about the Icelandic sagas—or indeed much about Iceland itself, as it turned out—before opening Richard Fidler and Kari Gislason’s Saga Land. I’d be surprised if I’m alone in learning something new in its pages. I’d made