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In these post-truth times, these days of shamelessness, when Donald Trump’s surrogates coin terms like “alternative facts” and slogans like “truth isn’t truth”, it strikes me as curious that no one has thought to restage Howard Brenton and David Hare’s Pravda.
People often ask me about Australia. It doesn’t matter where I happen to be—Vietnam, India, Morocco, South Africa—there seems to be no end of interest in the massive but tiny country that Paul Keating once memorably described as “the arse-end
We are living through an interesting moment for television comedy. At least since Louie first aired in 2010, though arguably as far back as The Larry Sanders Show, the push has been into darker, more genre-defying areas, to the point
When BoJack Horseman’s fourth season went to air, a year ago last month, I wrote one of the internet’s few dissenting opinions. My problems with the season, outlined in these pages at the time, were in reality rather minor, and
We pulled out of Amornsup Village in Nong Chok, in Bangkok’s far-eastern boondocks, in the late afternoon when its residents begin to stir. In the central square, barefooted teenagers played soccer on the dusty concrete—the sun’s anvil throughout most of
When Australian journalist David Hirst died in 2013, he was roundly celebrated, in this newspaper and others, as one of the few mainstream commentators to have predicted and warned against the 2008 financial crisis. His Fairfax column Planet Wall Street
In 2012, on the 26th anniversary of the evacuation of Pripyat, the city at the heart the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, I boarded a bus with a group of tourists and headed out to the site of the disaster. I had
Even before I arrived in Varanasi, I knew I wanted to reread the Varanasi section of Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. A freelance writer is always on the lookout for potential story ideas that will allow him