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Nov 23, 2024 | 
insidestory.org.au | Ken Haley
We call a book good if it entertains or educates us. But when it deal with such a well-covered topic as “the glory that was Rome,” about which you could be excused for thinking there was little new to relate, it had better fulfil both functions or its intended readers will find better things to do with their time.
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
eurekastreet.com.au | Ken Haley
War by Bob Woodward, published by Simon and Schuster, October 2024, 410 pp., RRP $55If facts alone could bring down a President of the United States … but why begin any review of a Bob Woodward book in a speculative mood when facts alone once did, and Woodward was instrumental in unearthing them?
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Oct 30, 2024 | 
eurekastreet.com.au | Ken Haley |David Halliday
As 2024 hurtles to its end, the urge to forecast what lies ahead is as tempting as it is tenuous. It is idle to wonder if 2025 will plunge us into a major global conflict when we cannot even be sure about the next upheaval to come out of the Middle East, or whether the United States will face a constitutional crisis that makes the events of January 6 seem restrained. What we can say is that, despite centuries of the most astonishing technological advances, human nature remains unchanged.
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Sep 22, 2024 | 
inreview.com.au | PHIL BROWN |John Miles |Ken Haley |Ben Adams
Impressionism is probably the most widely known and loved of all art movements. Crowds flock to exhibitions by its greatest artists: Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgard Degas, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. What most of us don’t know is the political and social background that led to this movement and how it was born out of a time of tumult in Paris. We all know French politics is complicated – just look at the current situation.
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Sep 17, 2024 | 
inreview.com.au | Suzie Keen |John Miles |Ken Haley |Ben Adams
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Sep 16, 2024 | 
inreview.com.au | PHIL BROWN |Ken Haley |Ben Adams |John Miles
What Clancy was to the Overflow, Thomas Scott Townsend was to Australia’s loftiest reaches. Yet few have heard his name. He ought to have been famous in his time and ever since as Townsend was the surveyor who from 1831 to 1854 put one town after another on the map. Towns like Portland, Eden, Albury, Tumut and Wagga (twice). He also, as this new study argues, might have been the first European to reach the continent’s highest point.
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Sep 6, 2024 | 
eurekastreet.com.au | Ken Haley
One of the most famous opening lines in literature comes from Dante’s Inferno, the first part of his Divine Comedy, when halfway through the journey of his life he finds himself in a gloomy wood, having lost his way. In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood. In the face of the Covid pandemic, many of us felt a similar sense of isolation and uncertainty, confined to our homes, disconnected, and grappling with the unknown.
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Jul 18, 2024 | 
eurekastreet.com.au | Ken Haley
Of course, the importance to our physical and psychological welfare of having a home is not a recent discovery: it’s no accident that 1948’s UN Declaration of Human Rights – which Australian jurist and politician ‘Doc’ Evatt was instrumental in drafting – states: ‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including … housing.’ That proclamation was itself a waypoint on the path to a more explicit imperative spelt out two...
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Jul 11, 2024 | 
eurekastreet.com.au | Ken Haley
But today, that old whole world order is teetering on the brink. With autocracy ascendant, belief in a superman (the mythical strongman) is, by definition, a threat to democracy. We live in clarifying times, just as those generations did. What is different today? Unawareness of history is greater. The blurring of once clear left-right divides. Again in the world there is an overabundance of weapons, and not much interest in ploughshares. But all of these are differences in degree.
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Jun 26, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Ken Haley
It’s a trope of our times that becoming a first-home owner has never been more difficult and, while there are tens of thousands of twentysomethings who can identify with that fact, it’s frankly no easier to buy your first home when you’re zooming in on 70. Nearly eight months ago, as I explained in November, a new estate agent took over the management of the inner-urban Melbourne apartment where I’ve lived since 2015.
