In The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle this playful sense of dis-orientation begins with the very first sentence of the book: ‘Not every thirteen year old girl is accused of murder, brought to ...

The Auditor General’s damning report on the school lunch programme– and the litany of callous bungles it has uncovered – should require associate education minister David Seymour to be offering his ...

Briefly a member of the war cabinet overseeing the Gaza war, [Eisenkot] has attacked Netanyahu for bowing too readily to U.S. demands for a ceasefire in ​Lebanon to settle the Iran conflict. He calls ...

This week, the Werewolf series of essays on classic children’s books features Susan Cooper’s 1973 novel The Dark Is Rising. The antlered horseman on the cover of The Dark is Rising is a depiction of ...

Political myths die hard. For decades it has been taken on faith – all evidence to the contrary – that those business-savvy National Party types really, really know how to run the economy, just as ...

No doubt, the government’s plan (a) to make KiwiSaver compulsory and (b) significantly increase the contribution rate required of both workers and employers would end up delivering a desirable boost ...

The Werewolf series on classic children’s books continues this week with “The Indian in the Cupboard” by Lynne Reid Banks. Usually, fantasy offers a means of escape, a way of bending the rules of ...

When Britain tried (and failed) to re-take control of the Suez Canal in 1956, it marked the moment when a formerly Great Power was forced to accept that the jig was up, the goose was cooked, and that ...

Every three years around this time, the election campaign begins to feel a bit like the old carnival Ghost Train. All aboard. After the lurch into darkness and after careening around the first corners ...

The Werewolf series of essays on classic children’s books continues this week with Harriet The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. Both Holden and Harriet M. Welsch are honest witnesses – spies, even – of a world ...