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The best way to see Surfers Paradise is from twenty kilometres away. From Currumbin, where I have been living for the past two months, one can take in the beauty of Sin City’s saw-toothed skyline without having to get too
The last e-mail exchange I ever had with Christopher Hitchens was not, on the face of it, all that different from the others. I had sent him a link to a news story about an attack on the Paris offices
“You know you’re in Tijuana when someone offers you a gram of cocaine for ten dollars.” The Australian tourist laughed and shook his head at the memory of the encounter, as though such things weren’t at all his reason for
It was the height of Ramadan, that wonderful, languid, celebratory month that so consumes the Middle East. And in Konya, Turkey, that had its repercussions. I had come up against some of these already. Lunch options were few and far
From our ship, the island of Saint Helena in the south Atlantic Ocean is imposing, its cliffs high and sheer, the wave-buffeted rocks at their base sharp and craggy. The capital, Jamestown, where we have just spent the better part
A few weeks back, in a letter to The Sydney Morning Herald, the US-led campaign against Islamic State was compared to the Spanish Civil War. This seemed appropriate enough. When I was in Iraq two months ago, I thought a
It is a cool, moist morning and a hotchpotch of formally attired officials in sashes and curious tourists in T-shirts and thongs are making their way past a bilingual sign down a grassy, gradual incline to the grave. A small
Does the world really need another book about writers eking out a living at the beginning of their careers, another portrait of artists as young men? The age-old, slightly disingenuous adage to write what you know often appears to have