Culture

  • The meaning of Obama

    “American Revolution: The Fall of Wall Street and the Rise of Barack Obama”
    By Kate Jennings
    Quarterly Essay 32
    Black Inc, 2008
    132 pages, $15.95

  • On the box

    The Long March — Pieces together the Long March of 1934, in which the Chinese Red Army broke out of their base in Jiangxi, southeast China, under attack by the ruling nationalist forces. Besieged by over a million nationalist soldiers, the

  • Sports for a few

    The competitive frenzy for winning in sports has been fuelled by aggressive marketing.

  • Peaceful alien or communist threat?

    The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)
    Directed by Scott Derrickson, starring Keanu Reaves & Jennifer Connelly
    Screening in cinemas Connelly
    The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
    Directed by Robert Wise, starring Michael Rennie & Patricia Neal.

  • A poem for Gaza

    I never knew death until I saw the bombing of a refugee camp Craters filled with disfigured ankles and splattered torsos But no sign of a face, the only impression a fading scream I never understood pain Until a seven-year-old girl clutched my

  • Our Bernadette at sixty

    IN 1969, that Ulster gutter preacher Ian Paisley himself with his Yankee doctorate from Bob Jones U, unsmiling, with his dirty money salted away, with his imperial law and his gunmen in the shadows called

  • Sucking up to Blair

    Blair Unbound
    By Anthony Seldon (with Peter Snowdon & Daniel Collings)
    Simon & Schuster, 2008
    669 pages, Paperback $29.95

  • Alistair Hulett, David Rovics tour Australia

    Australian fans of quality, progressive music are in for a real treat this summer with the joint tour by left-wing songwriters Alistair Hulett from Scotland and David Rovics from the US.