The journalistic cliche du jour – ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’ – from WB Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’ was quoted more often in the first seven months of 2016 than any other year in the past three decades....
Never has a prediction come to fruition so quickly: Sam Dastayari’s Analysis of the UK election result comes with a warning that the Australian Left – by which he seems to mean the Labor Party – won’t learn the right lessons because they’re ‘lazy’ and will only take...
Marooned on a traffic island in central London, Robert Maitland, the protagonist of JG Ballard’s Concrete Island, comes to inhabit a world that he always, on some level, knew existed, but that he never really knew. He drove passed it everyday on his way from his home...
There’s a meme that’s been doing the rounds online for a few years: a top-hatted dog sits at a kitchen table with a mug of coffee as flames engulf his house and smoke billows throughout the room. In the next panel, the dog is shown in close-up; he’s...
For several years after the release of Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, The Great Gatsby, I periodically found myself donning a tux to attend another Gatsby-themed party. The dress requirements always went unstated, but it was clear from the...
