While five great powers — Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal — were forging maritime empires between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, a sixth, Russia, was carving out an equally grandiose realm spanning Europe and Asia — not to mention claiming Alaska for a few decades before selling it to the United States in 1867. Along the Red Sea andin Ethiopia, Moscow also backed abortive attempts to join Europe’s scramble for another continent, Africa, in the 1880s. Russia’s territorial grip peaked at almost twenty-three million square kilometres stretching from the Baltic and Bl ..read more

The story of working-class chancers who parlay a great talent into fame and fortune is a well-thumbed parable of English popular culture. Maybe because it’s so rare. Charles Dickens started his working life as a child in a rat-infested factory making shoe polish, but because he wrote A Christmas Carol, he eventually got to meet Queen Victoria. The Beatles sang songs so addictive to the ear they could pay cash for their psychedelic Rolls Royces. David Beckham made soccer balls bend to his will and ended up marrying a Spice Girl. The Trading Game: A Confession is a memoir in the same tradition ..read more

“I remember the days when you could go into government meetings… and representatives from the US Trade Representative Office would say ‘We can’t do that because it would violate our international commitments,’” American economist Douglas Irwin told an audience at the Productivity Commission in February. “That would shut down the debate.” But that constraint is no longer there, he says. Geopolitics is back. “If we have to do things for security or defence, national security or what have you, we do it.” For Irwin, the old days were the 1990s and 2000s, when “markets were ruling and the state had ..read more

Ever since my review copy of Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama lobbed onto my doorstep, I’ve been thinking of synchronicity, that twentieth-century psychoanalyst’s term for the uncanny appearance of a cluster of coincidences. For Carl Jung, synchronicity is a sign of what he chose to call humanity’s collective unconscious. I was in the middle of reading Apeirogon, the Irish writer Colum McCann’s novel based on the lives of Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan. You may already be familiar with these two men, one a West Bank Palestinian, the other a Jerusalem Israeli, who in separate in ..read more

So, Anzac Day is with us once again. As it is a day for remembering, I began drafting this piece with the thought that it is now ten years since the beginning of the much-anticipated centenary of Anzac: those four long years of commercial and state-sponsored events and projects marking one hundred years since the Australia’s involvement in the first world war. Peak Anzac was reached, in my recollection at least, between November 2014 and April 2015. The bracketing events commemorated the departure of the first convoy of Australian troops from Albany in Western Australia in November 1914, and t ..read more

So, Anzac Day is with us once again. As it is a day for remembering, I began drafting this piece with the thought that it is now ten years since the beginning of the much-anticipated centenary of Anzac: those four long years of commercial and state-sponsored events and projects marking one hundred years since the Australia’s involvement in the first world war. Peak Anzac was reached, in my recollection at least, between November 2014 and April 2015. The bracketing events commemorated the departure of the first convoy of Australian troops from Albany in Western Australia in November 1914, and t ..read more

One Sunday morning nearly four years ago Kevin McCann was surprised to learn that an organisation he chaired was being hounded in the New Corp tabloids for being under “China’s grip” and “lobbying against Australia’s national interests.” It was quite a shock for the former Macquarie Group chair, one-time partner in the big Sydney law firm Allens, member of numerous business and artistic boards, and recipient of the Order of Australia. A surprise, too, for other members of the board, who included a host of eminent Australians drawn from diplomacy, intelligence, business, academia and politics ..read more

We seem to be getting a run of films based on true events and actual people: think of One Life and Killers of the Flower Moon for example. The latest are The Great Escaper and Wicked Little Letters, but they, like the others, also allow for extra characters and events in the interests of dramatic context and tension. I’d prefer them to avoid the claim to be “based on a true story” given that a “story” tends to have a beginning and a series of events leading to a controlled ending, whereas life tends to be messier than that. What really urged me to see The Great Escaper was the prospect of seei ..read more

“The heat,” says the sweaty Border Force official in Darwin, as if it explains all his problems. He’s on the government payroll in this tropical garrison town instead of comfortably cool down south in Melbourne where he belongs, where hail is predicted for the big horse race running this week. “Out of all the places you could go, why did you choose East Timor?” he asks, scanning our passports and our eyeballs, keeping Australia safe. “Tourism,” replies Claire. It’s the only answer. “It’s close,” I add. The flight to Dili is fifty minutes. Why does he need to know? The plane is near empty, ferr ..read more

History casts a shadow over the Middle East at the best of times, and none more so than now. Take the phrase “two-state solution,” which has become the political currency of the moment. Few, if any, longer historical shadows have fallen across the Middle East than this reference to an ideal of two countries, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, living side by side in relative harmony. In the absence of a realistic pathway towards resolving the longest-running conflict in modern history, this hollowed-out phrase serves an obvious political purpose. I use the word “pathway” deliberately. This ..read more