Still Life With Cat

is, they say, Ivan 'Rocket Man' Vasiliev, age 21. He's currently dancing in London with the Bolshoi and I first heard his na...

Back in 1994 I was writing a TV column for Eureka Street . Here's what I said about Laurie Oakes, whose weekly political interviews were...

One particularly detestable bit of all-purpose politics-and-public-service jargon is getting a good workout during this limp election campai...

Mungo McCallum on the "debate" in today's Crikey is in form as fine as it ever was back in the day, when he was writing for th...

Bernard Keane, in this morning's Election Special from Crikey, on last night's 'debate': The only momentary interest came r...

One of the many lovely things about reading fiction for a living is that it tends to make you an armchair (time-)traveller. Just in the last...

Here's some folk wisdom garnered over a lifetime of dealing with my father (a dear man in many ways, but pure Id, and born without even ...

Can there be any profession apart from popular music in which the gap between the good and the bad is as wide as it is in journalism? In Aus...

I got an insight into the way that Deputy Opposition Leader Julie Bishop 'thinks' tonight while listening to the ABC news on the car...

Some dot points arising from the last 24 hours: The Miles Franklin Literary Award is for a certain kind of novel. The criteria include spec...

Thanks to Clementine Ford (aka Audrey Apple) for alerting me on Facebook to this extraordinary item about penis size. You'd think it ...

Can anyone familiar with PR and/or media training please explain to me the reasoning behind advising pollies (for surely they must have been...

*WARNING: LONG POST* Sad as it makes me to do so, and after a couple of unhappy days, I have to recommend this disturbing but persuasive p...

Because I'm going to get this blog going properly if it kills me.

I don't watch MasterChef, for the excellent reason that the telly is borked and there's no time to get organised with a new antenna ...

Memo to the Liberal Party: if you want to sell something to women, enlisting the aid of the aggressive, amoral, antifeminist dick-wavers in ...

It's been a week and a half since Julia Gillard became Prime Minister in what was, contrary to much of the hostile commentary and despit...

That's the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature that Ms Gillard is placing on the Prime Ministerial office bookshelf. W...