Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
Goethe in the Haus
(Großer Hirschgraben 23-25, Innenstadt, Frankfurt, 22 August 2026) The ‘German Shakespeare’ – poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre-director, and critic – was born in this house on 28 August 1749 and here he learned to “storm and stress,” writing works including The Sorrows of Young Werther (regarded as the world’s first ‘best seller’) and initial drafts of his sublime Faust. Faust Part One was published in 1808; Part Two was only completed before his death on 22 March 1832, and published posthumously. The original was destroyed by WWII bombs but was re-constructed from 1947 to 1951. It originally looked like this: There…
Continue Reading →The Odyssey
(Directed by Christopher Nolan, 2026) My Ancient Greek class attended the Adelaide premiere of “The Odyssey” on the IMAX screen at Palace Nova East End, Adelaide. We are a hard audience. Our excellent teacher Dr. B (originally from Rome) has shepherded us from the alphabet to Plato via his amusing (but rigorous) methods over the last dozen years. So, By Zeus, Nolan had better do Homer right! He did. We had some minor quibbles – apparently Agamemnon’s black armour is not correct for the time, (but Benny Safdie made an amazing, surreal figure in it. Sauron eat your heart out)….
Continue Reading →Roald Dahl – The Complete Short Stories
(Volume One, 1944-1953; Volume Two, 1954-1988) Roald Dahl (1916 – 1990) Welsh born, Norwegian descent, started his writing life by accident. Invalidated out of WWII from the RAF, he was asked by C.S. Forester in Washington to prepare some accounts to publicise the war effort. His robust but sometimes surreal war stories ensued; he then enlarged his métier with droll and often shocking tales of the weird and unexpected. He was no great stylist: his sentences at times stray into the excesses reminiscent of Hemingway, but the ingeniousness of his little plots and the dark corners of life he illuminates…
Continue Reading →Being a Creature
(By Helen Parsons) (Wakefield Press, 2026) The Books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John tell of the Christ in the wilderness. Luke 4:1-8, for example, in the King James version, reads: And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, Being forty days tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered. And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread. And Jesus answered him, saying,…
Continue Reading →The Mushroom Tapes
Conversations on a triple murder trial (By Chloe Hooper, Helen Garner, and Sarah Krasnostein, 2025) Erin Scutter was born in 1974 . Her mother Heather is said, rather vaguely, to have been an academic (“an expert in children’s literature”) and her father, even more vaguely, “a company director”. Although her mother is important in this tale, her father is not. In May, 2025 Erin (now Patterson) was tried for three murders and an attempted murder. Famously, in 2023, Patterson had invited her estranged husband Simon, his parents, his aunt and his uncle, to lunch at her house in Leongatha, New…
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