The fanatic’s gaze: Louis Theroux and the West Bank settlers
He has made it his bread and butter for years: finding society’s kooky representatives, the marginal, the crazed and the touched.
Recent articles in Review
13 June 2025
Review: Perfect Victims
Mohammed El-Kurd is a poet, writer, journalist and organiser from Jerusalem in occupied Palestine.
12 June 2025
Hugh White and our post-American future
In his new Quarterly Essay, Hard New World, Hugh White delivers a devastating attack on Australia’s current defence policies.
6 March 2025
Reading al Nakba
The arrogance of early Victorian colonial settlement seems lost to amnesia. Maps of the time show the world as if diseased by a sprawling red virus – the British Empire. With the reach of the red went a blind and over-weening attitude of entitlement, a dictation of what would and would not be. Indigenous people were not engaged or consulted about what would decide their fate – there were a few significant exceptions to that tendency, including T.E Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, also known as Ned.
2 February 2025
The Taiwan story, How a Small Island Will Dictate the Global Future, by Kerry Brown, Penguin, 2024
Professor Kerry Brown is among Britain’s most distinguished China specialists. He has written very widely on modern and contemporary China and has experience not only in academia, but also in the British diplomatic service. He has some Australia experience, having directed the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney from 2012 to 2015.
31 January 2025
The APS has more work to do to address Robodebt revelations: Review of Mean Streak by Rick Morton
Towards the end of his book, after referring to the NACC initial decision not to investigate alleged misbehaviour and to the completion of the APSC’s code of conduct investigation, Rick Morton states: ‘a large group of the senior management of the Australian Public Service … would like that to be the end of things, as if robodebt was the result of a few bad actors and not the inevitable crisis that springs from a sclerotic institution.’ It is a conclusion that, sadly, I largely agree with.
21 January 2025
Summing up
The world and its people are facing very serious local and global emergencies. Climate change, economic instability, limits to free speech, threats to independent media and increasing social inequality all signal the breakdown of democratic systems across the world. The genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine are ongoing. Our political institutions and leaders are failing us with increasingly conservative policies that favour big business.
9 January 2025
Summing up
The world and its people are facing very serious local and global emergencies. Climate change, economic instability, limits to free speech, threats to independent media and increasing social inequality all signal the breakdown of democratic systems across the world. The genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine are ongoing. Our political institutions and leaders are failing us with increasingly conservative policies that favour big business.
3 January 2025
25 years of reviews and policy statements: What do they reveal about Australia's R&D challenges?
Australia’s ability to harness the full potential of its research and development (R&D) capacity has been a subject of intense scrutiny for at least 25 years.
3 January 2025
The fall of Israel
Dr Steinbock’s new book The Fall of Israel is a stunning look at the longstanding forces undermining the state of Israel and the lives of Palestinians, while fostering genocidal atrocities and regional escalation. His interview offers revealing insights about the ongoing catastrophe.
22 December 2024
Is humanity’s destiny Winton’s dystopian world?
I turned 90 recently after a long retirement following decades as an academic and an aquatic scientist working on the zooplankton of Australian and Antarctic waters. But now, every day of my life, there’s something deeply corrosive that eats into my psyche and it’s nothing to do with any fear or dread associated with my forthcoming demise which may not be too far away.
1 December 2024
Australia at war - again, again and again
Every year or so Australia gets a bulky new book about an Australian war, military action, hero or some other military matter written by what is known as ‘storians.
21 October 2024
Sanitising genocide
The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) has just published “The Most Moral Army”- an excoriating review of Israel’s continuous reliance on deceitful medical imagery to disinfect its horrific abuse of power in Gaza.
