Review

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…

The Fix: Escape banality, shun labels

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…

The Fix: An evolving Saudi Arabia

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…

A Marshall Plan for Ukraine?

The war must yet be won, however both German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have called for a “Marshall Plan” style commitment to…

War crimes: The trial of a fallen French war hero and lessons for today

Book review: France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain, by Julian Jackson (Allen Lane 2023) How might Vladimir Putin ever be tried for war crimes in Ukraine? How would a jury…

Imagining Trump’s second term

Review: Canada Alone by Kim Richard Nossal (Dundurn, 2023), and Trump’s Australia by Bruce Wolpe (Allen and Unwin, 2023) After 9/11, French newspaper Le Monde turned over its…

The decline of Europe: “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light”

Book Review: Homelands: A Personal History of Europe by Timothy Garton Ash (Bodley Head, 2023) A decade or so ago, Timothy Garton Ash might well have envisaged a memoir-cum…

AUKUS: A debate after the fact is still worth having

Book review: The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace (La Trobe University Press, 2023) When Robert Menzies announced his retirement in January 1966,…