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Nick Hordern
Nick Hordern is a former diplomat and journalist. He is the co-author of two histories of crime in Sydney: Sydney Noir: The Golden Years (NewSouth, 2017) and World War Noir: Sydney’s Unpatriotic War (NewSouth, 2019). He edited, and wrote the introduction to, the first English translation of Liu Yichang’s classic 1963 novel of Hong Kong, The Drunkard (Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2020). His latest book, Shanghai Demimondaine (Earnshaw Books), the biography of an Australian sex worker in China in the 1930s, was published in October 2023.
Nilaveli, on the north-east coast of Sri Lanka, is a long way from Sydney’s S.H. Ervin Gallery, but when in 2017 I visited the exhibition Margaret Olley: painter, peer, mentor, muse, which traced the links between Olley and her circle, the name of one of her fellow artists took me straight back to the white sands of Nilaveli Beach.
Juanita ‘Mitty’ Lee-Brown (1922-2012) and Margaret Olley ... (read more)
Sean Turnell is an Australian economist who was detained by Myanmar’s military regime from February 2021 until November 2022. An Unlikely Prisoner, his account of the ordeal, has quite a personal tone as he relates his struggle with unjust imprisonment by a regime whose hallmark was ‘a mix of the needlessly brutal, the petty, and the incompetent’. This personal story is also mixed with polit ... (read more)
In August 1943, John F. Kennedy, then aged twenty-six, was rescued from the threat of Japanese captivity – or worse – by a few brave Solomon Islanders, in an operation coordinated by the Australian naval officer Reg Evans. Evans was one of the Royal Australian Navy’s ‘Coastwatchers’, intelligence collectors based perilously behind Japanese lines.
Kennedy had command of PT-109, a small w ... (read more)
The political scientist Karl Deutsch once said that a nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past. These two new accounts of the history of relations between Russia and Ukraine, and the nationalist distortions of that history, would seem to bear him out. Vladimir Putin’s historical arguments for the war against Ukraine are widely accepted by his fellow countrymen and wom ... (read more)
It has been a long time since the West had a hero like Volodymyr Zelensky, who is frequently ranked alongside Winston Churchill as a wartime leader and orator, Mikhail Gorbachev as a reformer, and Emmanuel Macron as a political disruptor. However deserved these comparisons may be, they deflect attention from the murky post-Soviet environment which shaped his career. The collapse of the region’s ... (read more)
The idea that the world faces a second Cold War started out as hyperbole, but by 2016 it was sounding increasingly plausible. For more than a decade, Moscow, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, had been waging a diplomatic, political, and military campaign to restore Russian power – in the Caucasus, in Ukraine, and in Syria. In the West this has usually been portrayed as unprovoked aggressio ... (read more)
It is all Vladimir Putin's fault. Two years after the crisis in Ukraine erupted, the prevailing view in Europe, the United States, and Australia remains that responsibility for the conflict there – including the shooting down of flight MH17 – lies with Russia's president. This, the argument goes, is all part of Putin's plan to restore Russia's dominance of its region to the borders of the form ... (read more)
For countries, and none so important to Australia, have a political system as opaque as that of China. This is deliberate; since the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has striven to make turnovers in its leadership as bland as possible. But the elevation of the country’s current ‘Fifth Generation’ Leadership was actually full of drama. The New Emperors, w ... (read more)
Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in March was a dramatic sign of Russia’s sense that it had recovered from its post-Soviet weakness. Viewed in the West as an outrage, in Russia the seizure was portrayed as a triumph, the culmination of a national resurgence under Vladimir Putin. It remains to be seen how long this mood of triumph will last.
President Putin’s popularity has long been buoy ... (read more)