I’ve started to look for illustrators working around 1790 to 1810, mostly French, mostly with South Seas experience. I’m trying to construct a look which somehow equates to a world view, which we could use in a history documentary of the period.
I discovered by accident that the great Kraken image was drawn in around [...]

Here’s something I really respect.
Simon Sellars has been working on an anthology of writings and stories called Subterrain, supported by the City of Melbourne and published by Ozanam Community Centre. As Simon says in his email:
“The anthology is based on the one-on-one writing workshops I did with clients at the Centre — our contributors are [...]

New Zealand has a more honourable stance on a range of social issues, right? They took refugees we were too callous to shelter. They irritate the Americans about nuclear issues. They have a treaty with the Maori.
They also have some shitbag immigration arrangements our own department would consider as trophy material.
You would think that [...]

Absinthe, the legendary liqueur made from wormwood, is said to drive you insane. Certainly it fuelled a lot of high octane artistic frolicking in fin-de-siecle Paris. It has been banned since the end of the First World War, but now the stuff is back in the bottle and available on the shelf.
The EU forgot to [...]

“Taylor gave himself the title of the kings water-poet and the queens water-man. He was no poet, though he could string rhymes together on occasion. His gifts lay in a coarse, rough and ready wit, a talent for narrative, and a considerable command of repartee, which made him a dangerous enemy. Thomas Coryate, the author [...]

This is the Amazon River, in the grip of the worst drought in forty years, as parts of the dried forest burn in wildfires.
Greenpeace claims the drought is caused mostly by the increased temperature in the Atlantic, which is also fuelling the hurricanes across the Caribbean. Other factors include the reduction of tree cover [...]

Nguyen Tuong may now have only days to live, and the Australian opposition to his hanging in Singapore is truly desperate. Appeals to John Howard to appeal to ..; appeals to the Queen to appeal to…; nothing has worked in the past.
After all, Flor Contemplacion, a Filipina maid, was hanged in 1995, despite [...]

This is an extraordinary photograph. The man is Reinhold Meissner, perhaps the greatest mountain climber of all time. He holds a standard climbing boot of around 1970, battered from high altitude rock and icefields, with a faded piece of red cord as a lace.
It was found in the snow at 4,300 metres up a mountain [...]

The threatened London Critical Mass event that the police wanted to stop seems to have turned pretty strange.
The rainy night event was big enough to extend over five hours, starting on the South Bank, running up The Strand, around Buckingham Palace, down to Parliament House (oowah!), to Piccadilly Circus and ending at [...]

I. Lewis Libby, Chief of Staff and National Security Advisor to Dick Cheney and simultaneously an Advisor to President Bush, once a neo-con at the heart of the “Project for a New American Century” has been indicted for lying to a grand jury. According to WaPo, he is looking for new lawyers and spin doctors, [...]