Blog Archives
The Enamelled Box When they unearth the mass graves and discover the rivers of blood, or even stop to puzzle over a million lost golf-balls, may they also find medical instruments of ingenious design and exquisite precision; Let them…
The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing Harry Ricketts and Gavin McLean (eds) Penguin Books, $65.00, ISBN 9780143573098 Oddly enough – or perhaps not – when this book arrived at my door I remembered one of the more arcane…
Remembering Gallipoli: Interviews with New Zealand Gallipoli Veterans Christopher Pugsley and Charles Ferrall (eds) Victoria University Press, $40.00 ISBN 9780864739919 Amid the flood of printed words that have marked the centenary of New Zealand’s Gallipoli experience, Remembering Gallipoli comes with,…
Harmonious sensuality Ross Harris recalls the life and work of fellow-composer Jack Body (1944-2015) Jack Body was born in the small North Island farming town of Te Aroha to parents with little interest in music. Even so, he was playing…
Hinterland What lands lie east of here? North and south are known, and west, but to the east, to my left, the country folds in upon itself and falls away, rising in the near distance to a long tableland.…
Matthew Wright reflects on the ethics of book reviewing. It’s some years since New Zealand Books published a wonderfully nasty litany of my supposed failures in a book I’d written on South Island settler society where, the reviewer insisted as…
Holding on to Home: New Zealand Stories and Objects of the First World War Kate Hunter and Kirstie Ross Te Papa Press, $50.00, ISBN 9780987668851 One hundred years on, WWI continues to loom large in New Zealand life. With the…
John Horrocks revisits John A Lee’s novel Civilian into Soldier. “Whoosh – the good old Christian bayonet”: this is the scribbled annotation to a 1937 press clipping in one of John A Lee’s scrapbooks. He was commenting on an editorial…
A matter of time When I was young it was C.P. Snow averred anyone who did not know the Second Law of Thermodynamics was uneducated. ‘Two Cultures’ was his bag and what he wanted was scientists reading poems, Arts chaps…
New Zealand’s Historic Samplers – Our Stitched Stories Vivien Caughley David Bateman, $50.00 ISBN 9781869538668 Vivien Caughley’s opening definition of a sampler is “an embroidered cloth which records a stitched pattern, often the alphabet and numerals, sometimes pictures, and stitch…
Reviewing the reviewers
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