In spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of ... emigrating. And when it does, I often seem to hear about it. My e-mail inbox, quiescent until recently, has since early March begun to fill up again—just as it had done before the 2008 presidential election—with requests ...
Once, in the years B. D. (Before Deinstitutionalization), Australia's mental hospital care took two forms. There was the public-asylum form. Then there was the private-clinic form. In the public-asylum form—Sydney's Callan Park, Melbourne's Yarra Bend—they basically locked you up for ...
In 1935, British journalist James Agate admitted to obsession with a juicy but fundamentally parochial murder case, while from Quetta"now in Pakistan, then in the Raj"came news of a quake which had left 20,000 dead. He told readers of his diary, Ego: “This trial has moved me ...
This story (the title of which alludes to Jessica Mitford’s October 1974 Atlantic Monthly report, "My Short And Happy Life as a Distinguished Professor") really begins with two processes that became obvious to Australians in early 2008. First, there was the evidence"clear from the ...
Say what you like against us Australians, there is one activity where we excel, and that is, in producing artistic hoaxers. The nonexistent modernist poetic genius "Ern Malley" in the 1940s; a subsequent platoon of "Aboriginal" creators ("B. Wongar", "Wanda ...
Karen De Coster's article on “The Standard of Living Bubble” leaves open, inevitably, the question of foreign equivalents to the hoggish economic meltdown that Miss De Coster describes. Still unsolved, for instance, is the mystery of why Australia, so far, has managed (unlike, by the ...
The tale is told by M. F. Barnes, in her 1931 study Renaissance Vistas (and it has often been depicted by great painters, notably Botticelli and Carpaccio), of Saint Augustine, wandering along the seashore. Lost in cogitation upon the Holy Trinity, the saint meets a small boy who busies himself ...
You have no idea what joy lies in discovering that there is another human being in one's homeland who actually has heard of, and reads with pleasure, Samuel Francis. But so there is. Australia, where moral cowardice and insanely punitive libel laws have combined to produce an intellectual milieu ...
May I, even at this late stage of the John Lukacs controversy, offer a few thoughts that do not seem to have been articulated elsewhere on this site? Readers have now stepped into a first-person authorial zone. They should be, accordingly, warned. I have on my shelves a 2004 edition of Dr. ...
What is lacking in Peter Gay's account of modern art is a serious effort (or any effort) to explain that maniacal anti-bourgeoisie hatred which Baudelaire and, especially, Flaubert injected into modernism's bloodstream. It was a hatred all the more ridiculous, and all the more dangerous, because it ...
