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Colin Thubron’s The Amur River begins with the Mongolian authorities warning him that his trip is ill-advised. They’re talking specifically about his plan to enter the country’s rugged Khentii Mountains on horseback, though what he has in mind is much
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
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
As I have travelled around Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey these past few weeks, covering the lead-up to and aftermath of last weekend’s presidential election, I have been continually reminded of the last country in which I undertook such a project.
Natalia Antonova (@NataliaAntonova) is having a rough time of it. For most of this year, the Ukrainian-born, US-raised, ethnically Russian journalist and playwright has expected the worst and then been granted it. Crimea. East Ukraine. MH17. While Western correspondents condemn
In a media landscape that comprises a multitude of voices, following events across countries can be bewildering. It is often difficult to separate the voices that know what they’re talking about from those that merely like the sound of themselves.
On February 28, when reports started coming in that unidentified armed men in combat gear were patrolling outside Crimea’s airport and had occupied the region’s parliament building, Forbes contributor Mark Adomanis (@MarkAdomanis) took to his blog, ‘The Russia Hand’, to