Blog Archives

Barbarians at the gate? Penny Fenwick

A Shakeup Anyway ‑  Government and the Universities in New Zealand in a Decade of Reform Ruth Butterworth and Nicholas Tarling Auckland University Press, $34.95 Universities are amongst the most enduring of all social institutions ‑ a state of affairs

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Posted in Education, Non-fiction, Review

An old‑fashioned life, David Mackay

Captain James Cook: A Biography Richard Hough Hodder & Stoughton, $54.95 Explorers do not always present easy subjects for biographers. Often the central achievements take up a relatively small portion of their lives and the doggedness and perseverance required for

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Posted in Biography, Non-fiction, Review

Operatically triumphant, Jeanine Graham

Edward Stafford: New Zealand’s First Statesman Edmund Bohan Hazard Press $49.95 Years of exposure to the drama and rhetoric of the performing arts and a professional lifetime of meticulous attention to accuracy and detail have enabled Edmund Bohan to bring

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Posted in Biography, Non-fiction, Review

Still on the margins, Anne Else

Suffrage and Beyond ‑ International Feminist Perspectives Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan (eds) Auckland University Press, $39.95 The movement for women’s suffrage can be said to have begun at the World Anti‑Slavery Convention held in London in 1840, where American women delegates

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Posted in Gender, History, Non-fiction, Review, Sociology

It will all happen again, Brian Gaynor

Lost Property: The Crash of ’87…and the aftershock Olly Newland HarperCollins, $19.95 The mid‑1980s ‑ Allan Hawkins and Equiticorp, Fay and Connor slogging it out in Fremantle, Chase Corporation and mirror‑glass buildings, Bruce Judge, share clubs and investment seminars, Bob

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Posted in Economics, History, Non-fiction, Review

Over‑respecting the person, Tony Bellette

Frances Hodgkins: Paintings and Drawings Iain Buchanan, Michael Dunn, Elizabeth Eastmond Auckland University Press, $79.95 Do we have any right to claim Frances Hodgkins? Famous expatriate artists, to be regarded as properly belonging to their land of birth, normally continue

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Posted in Art, Non-fiction, Review

The need for a conservative rudder, Simon Upton

In 1987 I was rash enough to publish a slender volume of essays with the title The Withering of the State. It was written in the months preceding the biggest stock market crash for a generation and fully two years

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Posted in Opinion

Poem — Graham Lindsay

Hospital in Kabul Girl with heavily bandaged right knee and bandages on the left leg down to her calf, beyond which nothing stares stricken-eyed. No one breaks the tableau nurse, doctor or member of the camera crew to rescue her

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Posted in Poem

Poem — Leonard Lambert

Seacorn For Bob Orr, who knows that coast   You sent me down for sea‑corn deep among the rocks below the jetty ‑ It’s a delicacy, you said. Pick one of three. At the bach we found the water off,

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