Bookshelves Brandis’s Achilles heel is really holding things up. The famous back end of the well-rounded foot got injured while the high commissioner designate was delivering a fiendish backhand at tennis. The “Big Beast” was meant to take over from Fishnets Downer in early April but as things would have it Fishnets is still on the public teat, and will be there for next week’s CHOGM chinwag in London.

The dwindling citizens who read Lord Moloch’s tissues will have noticed that exciting fatwas are under way against Vice-Admiral Ray Griggs and barrister Julian Burnside. Griggs is vice-chief of the Australian Defence Force and in line to take over the job as top Defence wallah. However, he has committed the crime of divorcing his wife and marrying fellow navy officer Commander Chloe Wootten, now Griggs. Maybe he was inspired by Lord Moloch himself, who tied the knot on two occasions with young women from the factory floor.

The Russians know a thing or two about how to hold a press conference. In Moscow, Vladimir Putin holds an annual end-of-year session running for about four hours. In Canberra, his ambassador, Grigory Logvinov, was responding to the expulsion of two diplomats as part of a Western response to chemical weapon attacks on the Skripals in London.

Doug Humphreys, president of the Law Society of NSW, had a frightful time on his recent LAWASIA fact-finding mission to the Maldives. The delegation thought they had all the proper authority to conduct their investigation into the independence of the Maldives’ judiciary and crumbling rule of law under the strongman Abdulla Yameen, only to be taken into custody “in a closed detention facility under guarded surveillance” as soon as they arrived.

Kings of War is a four-and-a-half hour Shakespearean onslaught in Dutch at the Adelaide Festival, under the direction of Ivo van Hove and scenographer Jan Versweyveld. To keep us in the picture there were surtitles, but only our leading Hollander, Dr Andreas Blot, had he been there, could have wrung all the subtleties from the performance.

If you’ve never been to one of those newspaper chat things where celebrity journalists talk about the same stuff they bang on about in print, Gadfly is here to fill you in on what you’re missing. With $25 in his pocket, our field agent wended his weary way to the Maritime Museum in Sydney, where in close proximity to the sharks, stingrays and groupers, Janet Albrechtsen and Caroline Overington were on stage.

The Daily Advertiser in Wagga Wagga has experienced some major rethinking since Michael McCormack, the current deputy prime minister, was the editor of the mighty organ. McCormack’s editorial line in the 1990s – that humanity was in danger of being wiped out by disease-spreading gays – has been starkly revised. This week, we find the paper carrying a story about the town of Hay hosting a mardi gras parade, to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the big event in Sydney.

Sad to see alt-right exhibitionist and bore Milo Yiannopoulos pulling out of his $US10 million breach of contract litigation against Simon & Schuster. This was a case where neither side was covered in glory. One thing it did throw up were the notes on the draft from editor Mitchell Ivers, including morsels such as: “Throughout the book, your best points seem to be lost in a sea of self-aggrandisement and scattershot thinking.”

Archbishop Anthony Fisher must have been exhausted from all the fire and fury he recently poured down on the head of wretched LGBTQI sinners. But he’s picked himself up from the floor of the pulpit to tear off an epistle to Fairfax Media in response to the story about the billions of dollars of loot in the vaults of the Catholic Church in Australia.