Blog Archives
Editorial – Issue 31
Changing of the guard Independence, Colin James More than Rogernomics, the recovery of the treaty and the other momentous policy changes, the 1980s was the decade of independence. In that decade the people who make up New Zealand found a…
Pluralism rules, OK? Colin James
New Zealand Politics in Transition Ed Raymond Miller Oxford University Press, $49.95, ISBN 0 19 558339 6 Politics in New Zealand, 2ed Richard Mulgan Auckland University Press, $34.95, ISBN 1 86940 171 9 Beyond the Two Party System. Political Representation,…
Not top spinning, Colin James
The Spin Anonymous Hodder Moa Beckett, $29.95, ISBN 1 86958 442 2 Novelists who stray into politics often produce cardboard cutout conspiracies that treat power one-dimensionally. People knowledgeable about politics usually have too diminished an imagination and/or too distorted a…
Tagged with: Colin James, Hodder Moa Beckett, Issue 26, Winter 1996
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Editorial – Issue 23
Editor’s note, June 1996 Criticism In this issue we carry three articles in one way or another dealing with literary criticism — on a bad book on Mansfield, on writers and their critics and on the appropriate context for Maori…
View from below, Colin James
Another “religious” memoir, but in an entirely different vein, being not by a church leader but one of its loyal rebels, is Pauline O’Regan, There is Hope for a Tree, Auckland University Press/ Bridget Williams Books, $29.95, ISBN 186940 1328.…
Tagged with: Bridget Williams Books, Colin James, Issue 22, Pauline O'Regan
Posted in Non-fiction, Religion, Review
Posted in Non-fiction, Religion, Review
Editorial – Issue 20
Editorial – Issue 20, October 1995 Two awards for the price of one The Wattie has long gone, beans having been swapped for wine. Now the New Zealand book awards go, too. There is to be from next year one…
Editorial – Issue 19
The people be praised Where were the songs the soldiers sang? Les Cleveland asks of war histories in his lead review. They could tell us much about what being in the war was really like, about how ordinary soldiers served…
(Not?) fading, Colin James
Cuttings David Lange, Jonathan Hudson and Associates, no price given Ex-Prime Ministers can be a nuisance. Edward Heath pricked at Margaret Thatcher who demeaned John Major. Sir Keith Holyoake connived at the supplanting of his successor by Sir Robert Muldoon…
Tagged with: Autumn 1995, Colin James, David Lange, Issue 17, Jonathan Hudson and Associates, Winter 1995
Posted in Non-fiction, Politics & Law, Review
Posted in Non-fiction, Politics & Law, Review
Editorial – Issue 17
Colin James: New fizz This issue leads with two reviews of Laura Ranger. That is not because she is a curiosity, 10 years old and an accurate poet. It is because her first slim volume is the best book we…