culture

You have to hand it to Jan Morris. The Welsh literary legend seems to have gone through her 93 years doing exactly what she wants all the time, always with the same upper-class chutzpah. She was the intrepid journalist who interviewed Eisenhower and...

Yan Lianke’s Three Brothers is a tender, frank and philosophical memoir of growing up in a rural family cursed by “constant poverty” but blessed with “boundless grace”. Yan, a novelist whose biting political satires ( Serve the People! , for example...

Philosopher Glenn Albrecht calls it farmosophy – thinking philosophically and creatively in relation to the practice of farming. It’s a new name for an old undertaking – Hesiod’s agricultural poem “Works and Days” is one of the earliest works of...

“Writing in the first person is writing that admits that experience is always truncated,” writes Ellena Savage. The Melbourne-bred, Athens-based writer is powerfully self-aware in her debut essay collection, which marries cultural criticism with...

Author and activist Naomi Klein has long been a critic of consumer culture and its focus on individualism, arguing instead that we need to band together to deal with the world’s crises. “The tricky thing is that we are able to find our best selves in these moments of crisis, of high crisis, but within our economic system, the pressures of the market bear down pretty fast.”

The title of this book hits you like a reproach and the provocation is very much deliberate. Investigative reporter Sophie McNeill has more than 15 years’ experience working in oppressive regimes and We Can’t Say We Didn’t Know , her first book,...

Dhananjaya Rajaratnam has lived in Sydney for four years. He goes by the name Danny, has blond-tipped hair and has long abandoned the course that once qualified him for a student visa. Now he cleans houses for inner-city professionals and lives in...

In these uncertain times, the concept of travel is increasingly fraught. While borders were already closed for some, they have been further tightened in the wake of a global pandemic. But depending on who you are and the passport you hold, the...

Hilary Mantel has been at it for years now with her Wolf Hall /Thomas Cromwell novels and they are a thing of wonder. The nasty Cromwell – not to be confused with the English Civil War chap who ruled a monarchless Britain with a fist of iron – was...