The ‘external’ story is about the dilemma that faces the field-mouse Mrs Frisby when her son Timothy comes down with pneumonia and needs to rest at home. Alas, this is just when Farmer Fitzgibbon ...

We’re living in the era of professional sport, which is the pinnacle of capitalism, right? Sport is big business, and a virtual religion for hundreds of millions of people. Yet interestingly, the ...

More than anything else, Abel’s Island is a tale about love enduring through peril. It is also about the beauty of solitude. Over the course of its 119 pages, it tells the story of Abelard Hassam de ...

May 20, 2026: Another Minuteman III intercontinental missile was fired by USAF Global Strike Command from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and splashed down some 6,700 kilometres away, ...

Regardless, any criticism of these atrocities gets routinely labelled as antisemitism by Israel’s apologists. In New Zealand, their lobbying pressure appears to be working. These days for example, you ...

This week, the Werewolf series of essays on classic children’s books features Susan Cooper’s 1973 novel The Dark Is Rising. The antlered horseman on the cover of The Dark is Rising is a depiction of ...

Political myths die hard. For decades it has been taken on faith – all evidence to the contrary – that those business-savvy National Party types really, really know how to run the economy, just as ...

No doubt, the government’s plan (a) to make KiwiSaver compulsory and (b) significantly increase the contribution rate required of both workers and employers would end up delivering a desirable boost ...

The Werewolf series on classic children’s books continues this week with “The Indian in the Cupboard” by Lynne Reid Banks. Usually, fantasy offers a means of escape, a way of bending the rules of ...

When Britain tried (and failed) to re-take control of the Suez Canal in 1956, it marked the moment when a formerly Great Power was forced to accept that the jig was up, the goose was cooked, and that ...