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The international release of Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin was attended by two fitting ironies. The first was that Vladimir Putin’s Russia—after this month’s election result, it remains undoubtedly his—banned it outright on the grounds of its “extremism”. (Yelena
While McCarthyism has long been a go-to for American writers, the same cannot really be said of the Australian equivalent, the Petrov affair. It has been a decade since Andrew Croome’s Document Z. Mick McCoy’s What the Light Reveals is
Mai Khoi Do Nguyen has long been described as Vietnam’s Lady Gaga. In more recent years, as her political activism has come to the fore, her expressions of rude dissent, she has also been compared to Russia’s infamous protest band,
It is a truth universally acknowledged—well, acknowledged by everyone but the man himself—that Donald Trump is obsessed with the news media and its coverage of him. Among US presidents, only Richard Nixon has hated the media more, or been more
The smell hits you before anything else, about halfway between the bus station and the town centre, filling your nostrils and urging you onward. Then there’s the sight of it, a literal smoke signal, wafting upwards from street level before
It’s the end, as they say, of an era. Or at least it was meant to be. On Saturday last week, the RMS St Helena departed the South Atlantic island that gives it its name for what was supposed to
The following book reviews were written for The Weekend Australian back in 2016. For whatever reason — probably the fact that I didn’t file them on time — they were never published. I’m putting them out there now for posterity’s sake. From the review
Every morning in Transnistria, the self-proclaimed Eastern European country that no other country recognises, there’s a run on the banks. You wouldn’t think there would be much demand for a currency like the Transnistrian ruble, which doesn’t have an ISO