Future MP Race Mathews had an insider’s view of policy development — not least health policy — in the office of the leader of the opposition ...

She’s lost track of the number of times she has been asked to quantify her Indian identity, “sometimes by complete strangers.” Blood quantum as a measure of heredity and skin colour, both ...

In June 1934, at home on Moscow’s Volkonskaya Street, Boris Pasternak received a fateful phone call from the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin. “What do you think of Mandelstam?,” Stalin asked the poet.

Books & arts After the factory girls Antonia Finnane 25 November 2024 Yuan Yang profiles a new generation of Chinese women ...

It was 2014, Peter Dutton was health minister, and the Abbott government’s first budget announced that concession-card holders and other bulk-billed patients would now be charged $7 to see a GP. This ...

National affairs Peter Dutton’s road to nowhere Peter Brent 28 August 2024 The opposition leader has an electorally ineffective obsession ...

Some election results are widely anticipated. Some arrive as a big surprise. Others lie somewhere in between. Scott Morrison’s 2019 “miracle” is the most recent example clearly falling in the second ...

Generations of psychiatrists, psychologists and brain scientists can remember being turned on to the fascinations of mind and brain by the Anglo-American neurologist Oliver Sacks. In a long succession ...

Books & arts “Am I the one who’s missing something?” Nick Haslam 27 February 2024 A returned soldier’s belief in American virtue and progress is shaken Books & arts The ambiguity of hope Nick Haslam ...

“When I die, will you wear a black armband?” Helen Garner asks her footballer grandson. “Yes,” he replies, unselfconsciously declaring both his love and his acceptance that she will die. They are ...