Peter Craven

Melbourne

Columnist at The Spectator Australia

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Articles

Flesh

2 weeks ago | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Peter Craven

David Szalay’s new book, Flesh, is one of the finest novels to come out of Britain in years. An Englishman of Hungarian background, Szalay (pronounced “Sol-LOY”) can do anything he likes with structure and with style. His previous book, All That Man Is, was nominated for the Booker Prize and was characterised by undisclosed directions and apparent improbabilities that became in practice wonderfully real and lifelike.
The zenith of art

2 weeks ago | spectator.com.au | Peter Craven

Last week your columnist cut a paragraph stating that the original Melbourne Higgins in My Fair Lady, Robin Bailey, and Richard Wordsworth who was Fagin in the most notable revival of Oliver! were about as good as actors get in any role and that they were notably better than their Australian successors.
A poetic thriller about humanity and connection in the internet age

2 weeks ago | smh.com.au | Peter Craven

A poetic thriller about humanity and connection in the internet ageWe’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later. By Peter Craven April 9, 2025 — 12.00am, register or subscribe to save articles for later. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.
Unsurpassable | The Spectator Australia

3 weeks ago | spectator.com.au | Peter Craven

It’s a weird connection but they say Donald Trump is devoted to his presidential predecessor Andrew Jackson who was popular with the generation he comes from. Jackson was known as Old Hickory and he was a kind of deus ex machina in Davy Crockett films, a bit like Richard the Lionheart in Robin Hood or Ivanhoe.
Intensely engaging

4 weeks ago | spectator.com.au | Peter Craven

The Australian National Academy of Music gala performance on Friday 21 March was dazzling with guest conductor Asher Fisch leading these young musicians through an impassioned and grand performance of one of the supreme works of Western music, Brahms’s Second Symphony. There is something intensely moving about watching these super-talented kids give a performance so absolutely assured.
Theatre vultures will kill

1 month ago | spectator.com.au | Peter Craven

Having a sportswriter father is no excuse. The young man was tall, long fair-haired with a hat. ‘What do you do?’ ‘I’m an athlete,’ he replied. ‘Oh yes, what kind?’ ‘AFL’‘Really? The first eighteen?’ ‘Yes.’It was only later that I learned this was Darcy Moore, the captain of Collingwood and therefore one of the most revered and reviled figures in the country.
Shakespeare's war criminal? Henry V and the problem of heroism

1 month ago | eurekastreet.com.au | Peter Craven

Churchill would have understood. Bell Shakespeare have just begun a season of Henry V and it seems a reminder of what an oddity this battle hymn of a play actually is. Henry V is, after all, the last play of the sequence that gets properly going with Henry IV Part 1 though it also harks back to the high medievalist style in Richard II, Shakespeare’s proto-tragic representation of a drama queen King.
Never mind the cracks

1 month ago | spectator.com.au | Peter Craven

If you wanted confirmation that the world can change dramatically you need only remember the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989 and the end of what we had imagined was the thousand-year Reich of the Soviet Union. Well, Binge are showing a superbly crafted dramatisation by ZDF of the last days of a divided Germany which is centred round three sisters.
Flesh is a revelation of what fiction can do

1 month ago | eurekastreet.com.au | Peter Craven

ARTS AND CULTURE
Devotion and betrayals

1 month ago | spectator.com.au | Peter Craven

There is a Roman saying, ‘What the barbarians started the Barberinis completed’ with reference to one of the great dynastic papal families. Macaulay said that Roman Catholic Rome had survived the Vandals and the Goths and that it would survive when some visitor from New Zealand sketched from the broken arch of London Bridge the ruins of St Paul’s.