Bob Hughes who died this week in New York was a companion of my youth. We worked together some 50 years ago on the fortnightly Observer on which he made his name as an art critic. He cheerfully dismissed the established artists of the day from Dobell (‘superficial’) or Tucker (‘cynical’) to Boyd (‘mawkish’) or
I cannot be the only one to have been irritated by the tears of Anthony Albanese MP. Yes, gender roles have changed over recent decades and it is now considered OK for politicians to cry like footballers in public. Yet Winston Churchill was able to lead his blitzed country against Hitler without blubbering in public.
I was both right and wrong. When Tony Abbott’s Battlelines came out a few months ago I wrote in these pages that it had many excellent things to say but its thinness on economic policy meant that his Parliamentary colleagues would be unwilling to elect him as their leader. That was wrong. But I added:
Editing a small magazine is like writing a poem. It is half judgment, but also half inspiration. It can never be done by a committee. So I sensed disaster when I read that the Monthly in Melbourne boasted a committee that met regularly to make editorial decisions (even if it did meet, as reported, in