Review
Why big projects fail: Climate change and AUKUS submarines
Book review: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner (Penguin Random House, 2023)
We don’t need to look at detailed statistics to know that large-scale…
Manager of the internet, controller of the world?
Review: Underground Empire: How America Weaponised the World Economy, by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (Allen Lane, 2023)
Among foreign-policy thinkers of today, there’s…
Why do we travel to unsettling places?
During a summer break, The Interpreter will feature selected articles each day from throughout the past year. Normal publishing will resume 15 January, 2024. This article first…
Manila’s killing fields: Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on the poor
Book review: Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder In My Country by Patricia Evangelista (Penguin Random House, 2023)
“When I become president, when I take my oath of…
The Fix: Nationalist theatre, with a twist
We’re asking contributors to put together their own collected observations like this one – and as always, if you’ve got an idea to pitch for The Interpreter, drop a line via the…
Espionage top ten
Australian spooks are not a literary lot. The secret services of Britain and the United States have spawned many spy fiction authors, but we are still waiting for a domestic John…
The Fix: A death in Malta
We’re asking contributors to put together their own collected observations like this one – and as always, if you’ve got an idea to pitch for The Interpreter, drop a line via the…
Tales from the magic circle
Book review: Beauty is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe by Joachim C. Häberlen (Allen Lane, 2023)
By chance, the legendary Italian intellectual…
The Fix: Simple history is never simplistic
We’re asking contributors to put together their own collected observations like this one – and as always, if you’ve got an idea to pitch for The Interpreter, drop a line via the…
Practising politics in a moral wilderness
Book review: Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within, by Rory Stewart (Jonathan Cape, 2023)
To explain away their failures, errors and flaws, many politicians have consoled…