Category Archive: LIFE
Tom Stoppard
(3 July 1937 to 29 November 2025) Playwright Tom Stoppard was a signal for wit, intellect, complexity of life and ideas, and verbal virtuosity, even when he was in ‘speech-writing’ mode. His first major play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), a riff on the treacherous school chums of Hamlet, made his name (although Harold Bloom described the play as “Beckett obsessed”). When asked by a theatregoer in New York, “What is it about?” he reportedly replied: “It’s about to earn me a great deal of money.” Better plays include Travesties (1974), where characters such as James Joyce and the…
Continue Reading →But Is It (Test) Cricket?
(1st ashes test, Perth, 21/22 November 2025) Sir Donald Bradman wrote in 1961: “In recent years the game has been criticized as being too slow for our modern civilization – a horse and buggy game in an aeroplane age.”* After Perth (and Melbourne on 26 & 27 December) one starts to hanker for a buggy whip. I had a ticket at Perth Stadium (the nose bleed section, but still a great view) for Day 2 of the 2025/26 first cricket test between England and Australia, representing a rivalry of over 148 years. Australia had held the Ashes (a historic urn…
Continue Reading →Robert Redford
(18 August 1936 to 16 September 2025) In the wake of a violent death in Utah, another quietly slipped away in the Beehive State; Robert Redford, one of the last of the old school movie stars. He was not a particularly good natural actor but in the right role he could shine, and his directorial work was outstanding. On screen, he projected clean calm integrity – a look that Variety described as “strawberry blond California-born sun god”. He also campaigned for environmental causes and in the 1980s created the Sundance Film Festival that fostered a whole generation of interesting filmmakers….
Continue Reading →No Swiss Bliss
(Eurovision Song Contest, Basal, 2025) “in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Thus Harry Lime to Holly Martins in The Third Man, and whilst Orson Welles, who apparently wrote the line, failed to mention the creation of toblerone, there is still a harsh truth about this beautiful, woke, sterile country. So it is a pity that it played…
Continue Reading →Barrie Robran
(1947-2025) In the Greatest Game of Football ever played, the 1973 Grand Final, where his North Adelaide side was going for three Premierships in a Row (after triumphs in 1971 and 1972, along with the 1972 Champions of Australia Trophy) Barrie Robran just-about won it off his own boot. You can Google his stats and many accomplishments ( https://sanfl.com.au/history/hall-of-fame/barrie-c-robran-mbe/ ): all we can add is that he was the best footballer that most of us have ever seen, and one of the nicest. He was invited by Glenelg Football Club to mark an anniversary of the 1973 GF (1998, from…
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