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Keywords: Peter Thomas

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The Booker Prize and why it matters

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 12 November 2024

    As the Booker Prize winner is announced, the perennial questions resurface: What does winning truly mean for writers — and for readers? As public values shift, literary prizes ignite fierce debate about artistic merit, cultural relevance, and the commercial impact of awards. Can a prize still shape the future of fiction?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Sonny Boy: A Memoir by Al Pacino review

    • Peter Craven
    • 08 November 2024

    Al Pacino is an actor we’re inclined to take for granted, given his presence in some of the greatest popular films of the last half century, not least his Michael Corleone in Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, which revealed an actor of extraordinary stature. Sonny Boy is a consistently diverting and illuminating book by a man who has little pomp and circumstance about him. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Betting the nation: How Australia became the world's biggest loser

    • Claire Heaney
    • 11 October 2024

    Australia’s gambling culture, once seasonally grounded in the Spring Racing Carnival, has become a year-round obsession. From family sweeps to the rise of betting apps, gambling has become ingrained in the nation's identity, leaving in its wake a growing crisis of addiction, debt, and societal harm.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Only in America

    • Peter Craven
    • 25 July 2024

    It’s easy, isn’t it – much too easy – to invoke the standard response that only in the so-called Land of the Free could these things transpire. A vulgar, mendacious man who has refused to believe that he lost the last election is now the improbable victim of an assassination attempt. And the incumbent president, who has not done badly at his impossible job, surrenders his chance at re-election.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    John Grisham and the Camino literary caper

    • Peter Craven
    • 05 July 2024

    For a long time now, John Grisham has been part of the air we breathe. He's one of those writers who’s all things to all people. His latest Camino books are books about books;  a form of meta crime writing and you have to admire the move on the chessboard they represent. Can John Grisham be self-reflexive?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    David Marr's penance by storytelling

    • Peter Craven
    • 20 October 2023
    3 Comments

    In Killing for Country, David Marr confronts Australia's dark colonial past, revealing unsettling truths about the Australian Native Police's brutal acts. Published during the Voice referendum, Marr intertwines personal ancestry with national guilt, urging Australians towards truth-telling and reconciliation. This isn't just history; it's a call for atonement.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The disquieting lessons of Ian McEwan

    • Peter Craven
    • 14 June 2023

    Ian McEwan's Lessons marked a sharp twist in a five-decade literary career, and presents an opportunity to reflect on his expansive body of work. The one-time literary rogue and Booker laureate now stands as the unquestioned doyen of modern English fiction, his audacious work perpetually navigating undercurrents of unease.

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  • RELIGION

    Church reform and the monarchy

    • John Warhurst
    • 13 September 2022
    7 Comments

    Republican sentiments from prominent Australians did not ever preclude great personal admiration for Queen Elizabeth for her devotion and service. Now, following her death, attention has particularly turned to her Christian faith. Following the lead of Pope Francis, the Australian bishops have joined in widespread community admiration. Pope Francis spoke of ‘her steadfast witness of faith in Jesus Christ and her firm hope in her promises’.   

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Why does poetry matter?

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 25 August 2022
    11 Comments

    In most circles poetry doesn’t matter. It doesn’t put bread on the table, nor raise people to revolt nor even make news unless a grizzled footballer is outed for secretly writing poems. Even in churches poems and hymns are altered to improve their orthodoxy in matters of faith, gender, race or modernity, but rarely their poetic quality.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The constant remaking of a nation

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 17 August 2022
    4 Comments

    Few Australians of Irish descent will now be familiar with this history and the experience that accompanied it. They would see themselves as simply Australian. But the emphasis on social justice, the recognition of the value of community, and the concern for people who are marginal that are communicated through Catholic schools and the sympathy with the underdog owe much to the Irish heritage.

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  • RELIGION

    War, truth and Christianity

    • Peter Vardy
    • 21 July 2022
    5 Comments

    Pope Francis recognised that Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine was ‘perhaps somehow provoked’ and said he was warned before the war that Nato was ‘barking at the gates of Russia’. In an interview with the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica the Pope condemned the ‘ferocity and cruelty of the Russian troops’ but warned against a fairy tale perception of the conflict as good versus evil.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    When ‘Good Refugees’ are admitted

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 21 March 2022
    12 Comments

    While Australia has developed into a multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan state based on immigration and humanitarian intakes, the country has never gotten away from the sense that some are simply more welcome than others. Be they migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers, preferential treatment abounds.

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