Death is increasingly welcome in our society. There are lives heartbreakingly cut short in their prime by crime, sudden illness and accident. But for the majority of us, drifting into pain and indignity, the words about our deaths are likely to be “merciful”, …

Patrick Cockburn is an Irishman and starts his book with the familiar, but here so appropriate, verse from Yeats: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold …” The Middle East didn’t just break open by itself, as Cockburn lays out in devastating …

Non-government agencies are a “fifth estate” in international politics. Governments like them during disasters, hate them at other times: they look at systemic causes of misery after treating the symptoms, then try to turn tables by empowering the …

For more than 40 years, Indonesians have enjoyed, and puzzled over, columns written by Goenawan Mohamad in the weekly magazine Tempo. The columns, usually no more than 800 words, are reflective sometimes to the point of dreaminess. They refer …

The last time Australia declared war was 1942, against Bulgaria and Thailand, to tidy up our official state of belligerence. Which is not to say we haven’t been in any wars since. Far from it: we just need to be asked. And often, we ask to be asked. …

Flies buzz over congealing pools of blood in a Victorian farmhouse. Karen lies dead in the hallway, her little boy in the bedroom where he’d tried to hide. A baby wails from her cot in another room. Out in a paddock, Karen’s husband, Luke, sprawls …

Jürgen Todenhöfer is a household name in Germany where he’s been a judge, a member of federal parliament, a journalist making risky journeys into some of the nastiest recent wars, a publishing executive and a philanthropist − mostly at the same …

Alan Moorehead is a strange obsession for a former editor of The Big Issue. Even for baby boomers, the name was on the spines in the bookshelves of their parents, rather than ones they bought themselves. For younger generations, it had vanished. …

Why we haven’t yet had an Aboriginal secession movement − say, a uranium republic declared in part of Arnhem Land − is a puzzle. Half the United Nations would probably recognise it. Stan Grant’s part-memoir explains why. Raised around country …