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1 week ago | 
spectator.com.au | Peter Craven
The house was awash with the Russians this week – first because someone was reading George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. In this book, the author of Lincoln in the Bardo concentrates on the great Russians of the nineteenth century – Chekhov and Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol – to show what fiction can do to the imagination when it’s taken slowly.
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2 weeks ago | 
waste-management-world.com | Peter Craven
Are Current EU C&D Waste Recycling Targets an Obstacle to Growth?
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2 weeks ago | 
spectator.com.au | Peter Craven
By the time this is published, your columnist will have seen the students of the National Theatre perform their chosen version of Antigone. The earliest of Sophocles’ Theban plays, though the climax of them in terms of subject matter, and the recapitulation of the story which begins with Oedipus Rex.
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3 weeks ago | 
spectator.com.au | Peter Craven
One of the greatest documentary filmmakers who ever lived died last week at the age of 97. He is the man who made The Sorrow and the Pity (Le Chagrin et la Pitié) which is the four-and-a-half-hour account of what old-timers born before the second world war refer to as the Fall of France.
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1 month ago | 
spectator.com.au | Peter Craven
Sometimes you’re just too clapped out to attend the most sparkling bit of theatre and so it was for your columnist the night of the opening of the great Max Gillies’ one-man show at Melbourne’s fortyfivedownstairs. It sounds however like a delight. The subterranean venue (impossible for the halt down those rickety stairs) has seen its wonders.
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1 month ago | 
spectator.com.au | Peter Craven
Who would have thought? The arena concert version of Les Miserables, Claude Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s sung-through extravaganza is no mere spectacle – it is a spectacular achievement. The sound quality is impeccable, every word is utterly comprehensible and at the same time we get massive close-up screens of the actor-singers.
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1 month ago | 
spectator.com.au | Peter Craven
Bill Henson, the greatest Australian photographer, has a show at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery at 6pm Friday 16 May. It’s exciting that Melbourne Opera are putting on that very grand and moving French opera Samson and Delilah at Melbourne’s Palais on 1 and 2 June. It is one of the mightiest of all operas and it has a tragic intensity of form that makes it Saint-Saëns one opera that has stayed in the catalogue where he is otherwise best known for that playful piece Carnival of the Animals.
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1 month ago | 
spectator.com.au | Peter Craven
We sometimes forget how much opera provides a captivating alternative to classic drama but this was written all over Opera Australia’s Verdi Gala concert with Nicole Car which was such a triumph the other week. And it’s pretty obviously the rationale for Angelina Jolie’s inhabitation of the role of Callas in her epic Maria.
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1 month ago | 
smh.com.au | Peter Craven
By Peter Craven May 7, 2025 — 12.00am, register or subscribe to save articles for later. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. FICTIONMy Name is Emilia Del ValleIsabel AllendeBloomsbury, $32.99What a strange and dazzling writer Isabel Allende has become.
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1 month ago | 
eurekastreet.com.au | Peter Craven
Who would’ve thought it? For weeks the cognoscenti in general and the press corps in particular had said that what we were looking at was the strong likelihood of a minority Labor government under Anthony Albanese’s prime ministership, but with the needful support of the Teals, the Greens, whoever would back Albo and co against Peter Dutton’s Coalition policies.
