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Books & arts
Books & arts
The price of pleasure
Zora Simic
5 June 2025
A journalist explores the “sexual wellness industry”
Books & arts
Roads not travelled
Jane Goodall
4 June 2025
Two American drama series tip-toe around the country’s plight
Books & arts
Can I offer you a hand grenade?
Philippa Hawker
30 May 2025
The familiar and the imaginary come together in two new films
Books & arts
Empire of the southern seas
Alessandro Antonello
27 May 2025
Australia is better seen as a vast archipelago, according to a new exploration of its iciest reaches
Books & arts
How little one knows, really, of one’s parents
Caitlin Mahar
26 May 2025
French sociologist Didier Eribon goes in search of his working-class mother
Books & arts
Ben Chifley versus the banks
Stephen Mills
26 May 2025
The former Labor PM’s battle with the banks still matters — for both sides of politics
Books & arts
Donald Trump goes to Hollywood
Nick Herd
23 May 2025
The American president’s film and TV tariff plan has its genesis as far back as the 1940s
Books & arts
Empire’s end
Ken Haley
23 May 2025
Old ties were broken forever by the time the second world war drew to a close
Books & arts
Mission creep
Philippa Hawker
16 May 2025
With an eighth instalment,
The Final Reckoning,
has Tom Cruise really embarked on his last Mission: Impossible?
Books & arts
Not in the mood
Andrew Ford
16 May 2025
What is Spotify doing to music?
Books & arts
War by other means
Pete Millwood
13 May 2025
Could diplomacy have changed the course of postwar Chinese history?
Books & arts
Triumph of the image
Philippa Hawker
2 May 2025
A deep dive into the archives of controversial filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl has some startling moments
Books & arts
Coming into focus
Richard Johnstone
29 April 2025
Time has transformed photographs of largely unknown people into representatives of an era
Books & arts
Meeting the moment
Gary Werskey
29 April 2025
A sociologist’s dissection of hyperglobalisation and its legacies
Books & arts
The devil in your hand
Peter Mares
25 April 2025
Sport and gambling are becoming dangerously intertwined on both sides of the Pacific
Books & arts
Body politics
Alecia Simmonds
24 April 2025
A new biography of Beatrice Faust illuminates a distinct strand of Australian feminism
Books & arts
Unsettling portraits
Kate Fullagar & Michael A. McDonnell
17 April 2025
What can colonial portraits tell us about the past?
Books & arts
All in the family
Tim Rowse
14 April 2025
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has built a political philosophy on her family’s efforts to reconcile the past and the future
Books & arts
Shored against our ruins
Gordon Peake
10 April 2025
Robert Kaplan’s latest book is characteristically thoughtful and necessarily bleak
Books & arts
Small mercies
Philippa Hawker
10 April 2025
A new film rises to the challenge of adapting a heartbreaking Irish novella
Books & arts
The improvisers
John Edwards
8 April 2025
As Australia faces a crisis of orientation, an expatriate argues that being adaptable is better than being visionary
Books & arts
Inner worlds
Catherine Kevin
8 April 2025
What should we learn from the failings of the national domestic violence prevention strategy?
Books & arts
Auld acquaintance
Andrew Ford
4 April 2025
Thirty-six year after its premiere, there is finally a recording of Michael Tippett’s problematic last opera
Books & arts
Imagine Sisyphus happy
Peter Mares
31 March 2025
Is hopeful pessimism the best response to climate change?
Books & arts
Complex questions, simple answers
Martha Macintyre
28 March 2025
Can “tribal impulses” really be harnessed for the greater good?
Books & arts
Top Gere
Philippa Hawker
27 March 2025
Writer-director Paul Schrader is reunited with his
American Gigolo
star, Richard Gere, in a tale of mortality, morality and deception
Books & arts
The many meanings of Melanesia
Graeme Dobell
25 March 2025
An Australian journalist’s slow journey from Fiji to New Guinea
Books & arts
Stitches and holes
Anne-Marie Condé
24 March 2025
A new biography wrestles with the challenge of capturing a decade and a half of Miles Franklin’s life
Books & arts
Stuck in the middle
Michael Gill
17 March 2025
An American journalist lifts the veil on a company that might exemplify China’s future
Books & arts
Comfort ye my people
Andrew Ford
13 March 2025
For writer Charles King, Handel’s
Messiah
offers “the staggering possibility that the world might turn out all right”
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