Recent years have highlighted the politicisation of appointments to the Supreme Court of the United States, and how consequential these judgeships can be. Following the death in 2016 of arch-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, in his final months as US president, nominated moderate Merrick Garland ...

This year is huge for the Opéra National de Paris. It celebrates the 350^th anniversary of the founding of Académie Royale de Musique in 1669, the thirtieth anniversary of the inauguration of the Opéra Bastille in 1989, and the 150^th anniversary of the death of Hector Berlioz. Les Troyens (The Trojans) opened the ...

In this fortnight's Update: ABR Arts paywall news; Melbourne Opera's The Flying Dutchman; The Highly Strung Players return to Perth; the Sydney Theatre Awards winners announced; March Dance festival hits Sydney; the Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowships for 2019; and giveaways for Green Book and Merciless Gods ...

Beware of Pity, the touring co-production of Complicité and Schaubühne, offers a dazzling vision of ethical crisis. Director Simon McBurney’s adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s 1939 novel (Ungeduld des Herzens) compellingly explores the social implications and consequences of individual sentiments without ... 

It is often observed that we live in an age of ‘directors’ opera’, where the name of the director precedes the name of the opera, never mind the composer. Yet there remain relatively few directors who have become indelibly associated with a particular visual style. South African William Kentridge is one ...

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Baronet, (1833–98) to give him his full entitlement, is an artist who polarises people. Some relish his otherworldly and imaginative narrative subjects, the rich and saturated palette, the sumptuous decorative surfaces. Others respond in the same way as one of the ‘vivid young moderns’ overheard by ...

To browse through an edition of The Negro Motorist Green Book in 2019 (as can be done through digital library archives) is a disquieting experience. These books, written by Victor Hugo Green in 1936 and published for thirty years, offered advice to African Americans travelling in the segregated American South ...

Though it begins with an elaborate disclaimer regarding its status as a work of fiction, Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro (aka Them) is manifestly a portrait of Silvio Berlusconi, former prime minister of Italy, media tycoon, populist, authoritarian, and playboy. Befitting its subject, the film is showy and often crude ...

In this fortnight's Update: Paul Kildea's book on Chopin hits the big screen; the Sydney Theatre Awards nominations; China's Terracotta Army comes to Melbourne; Gerald Murnane wins $80,000 Prime Minister's Literary Award for fiction; the shortlist announced for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, and some giveaways ...