Antipodes

At the start of 1962, when I sailed from Sydney for the Old World, my grandfather was surprised, indeed slightly shocked, that a young Austr...

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The French media are full of in-depth articles about a horrendous crime perpetrated by the precursors of present-day Turkey exactly a centur...

Within the forthcoming 48 hours, my native land will be moving massively into a lugubrious funereal mode of existence, incorrectly labeled a...

I’ve often seen this fellow drumming on a wooden pole alongside the tiled box in which I put sunflower seeds for the flock of great tits [...

Click to enlarge Its size suggests a didgeridoo. But the line of holes indicates that we’re faced with a wooden specimen of the flute ...

My paternal aunt Yvonne Elizabeth Skyvington was born at the Hillcrest Hospital in Rockhampton (Queensland, Australia) on May 1, 1919....

People who’ve dabbled ever so little in the domain of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics—to the extent, say, of reading the fantastic story of ...

Click YouTube for a bigger version of the video I couldn't help thinking that, when the girls got up out of the uncomfortable pos...

I’m old-fashioned… which isn’t surprising in the case of a fellow born in 1940. I belong to a generation of old-timers who were never tempte...

The Texan singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt [1944-1997] gave the world a fabulous song, If I needed you , which used to be sung by Joan Ba...

A few years ago, when I needed a special self-portrait for a blog post (a photo that would show me wearing a newly-purchased Russian black-f...

Like millions of my fellow-citizens, I was shocked to learn (through an early-morning tweet) that the collision of a pair of helicopters in ...

The blog post you’ve started to read is extraordinarily trivial. Besides, there’s no way in the world that you might be able to deduce anyt...

On chilly winter evenings, my dog Fitzroy loves to sit down in front of the computer (not surprisingly, he’s a Macintosh addict) and brows...

I’m always amused and impressed by the surprising artistic creations of talented individuals, even when they’re relatively trivial.

The Lebanese-Swiss cartoonist Patrick Chappatte has authorized me to translate his French into English and to include here this pathetical...

I've written and recently published a pair of books on my family history: one about my father's side, and the other about my mother...

The heavenly creature in this 17th-century Indian miniature is known as a Buraq (Arabic term for lightning ): This is the kind of win...

For English and Australian visitors to Paris, driving has always been been a somewhat disturbing experience, because the French drive on th...