John Lennon once described Yoko Ono as “the world’s most famous unknown artist. Everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.” Others were more vicious, portraying her as a family... Read more »
In the old Scottish ballad, Tam Lin, a girl named Janet is warned by her family not to go near the well at Carterhaugh. There lurks an elfin knight who will take... Read more »
Magic Beach by Alison Lester has won Guardian Australia’s poll to find Australia’s best children’s picture book of all time. More than 100,000 votes were cast after polling opened on 27 January.... Read more »
In a 1924 letter to André Gide, Thomas Mann said he would soon be sending along a copy of his new novel, The Magic Mountain. “But I assure you that I do not in... Read more »
Like many kids of the VHS generation, I must have watched my taped-off-the-telly copy of Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) well over 100 times. I probably knew every frame as well as Walt... Read more »
Hekate, the Greek goddess of magic and the underworld, is the prototypal witch known to many from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where she chastises the weird sisters for their meddling. Along with witchcraft and... Read more »
Burglar Bill ‘I worked with kids who struggled – this one boy would listen with rapture’ Thirty years ago I was a healthcare assistant working for CAMHS in a major city. It... Read more »
Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel, The Vulnerables, emerges from the words of others. The first line comes not from the narrator herself, but from another work she now barely recalls. From there it’s... Read more »
You might think, with the completion of the Human Genome Project 20 years ago now, and the discovery of the double helix enjoying its 70th birthday this year, that we actually know how... Read more »