Peter Rose

'A Masked Ball' and 'Aidia' (Opera Australia)

ABR Arts • 02 May 2013

Opera Australia’s spring season, after an impressive autumn one (with the well-received Lucia, Butterfly, and Salome), opens with two masterpieces by Verdi in his bicentennial year. It is a decidedly rocky pairing. ... (read more)

Editor’s Diary 2012

Online Exclusives • 09 March 2013

January 5 Dmetri Kakmi has landed himself in hot water with his Age article on the disgraced cricket writer, Peter Roebuck, who committed suicide late last year because of his penchant for spanking African boys. The Pharisees are livid because Dmetri suggested that ‘The act of caning for sexual purposes is a two-way psycho-drama.’ Much more shocking, I thought, was Dmetri’s claim that Montg ... (read more)

The Rape of Lucrece

From the Editor’s Desk • 05 February 2013

There is at least one bravura performance in Melbourne right now, and it warranted a much larger house than we saw last week (February 1), when Southbank Theatre was only half full. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of William Shakespeare’s long poem The Rape of Lucrece was first seen in Australia during the recent Sydney Festival, but it was premièred almost two years ago, at the Sw ... (read more)

Opera Australia's Melbourne season

From the Editor’s Desk • 21 November 2012

 Opera Australia returns to Melbourne for a short season of three operas – one German, two Italian, all notable for their gory finales. The season opened on 14 November with Moffatt Oxenbould’s production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, which has been entertaining us since 1998. Done well, Puccini’s ‘orientalist’ masterwork is riveting. The orchestration alone is worth the price o ... (read more)

'Dark, Not Day', a new poem by Peter Rose

October 2012, no. 345 • 24 September 2012

... (read more)

Peter Rose reviews 'Point to Point Navigation: A memoir, 1964 to 2006' by Gore Vidal

June 2007, no. 292 • 06 August 2012

It was David Marr who commented that the key character in Gore Vidal’s first memoir, Palimpsest (1995), was not Jimmie Trimble, the boy whom Vidal loved when they were at school and who died, aged eighteen, at the battle for Iwo Jima; nor Vidal’s blind and adored maternal grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, whom young Gore would lead onto the floor of the Senate; nor his life partner of ha ... (read more)

Australian Book Review goes to Brisbane

From the Editor’s Desk • 03 July 2012

  As we broaden our team of contributors and extend our non-Victorian content, we are currently focusing on Queensland, with good results and some excellent new contacts. We expect this quota to increase markedly in coming months. In mid-July I will be spending a few days in Brisbane, spreading the word about the magazine and recruiting new contributors. I’ll be taking part in a few events ... (read more)

Dial M for a horror story

From the Editor’s Desk • 31 May 2012

‘An important book’ is one of those facile terms that usually have an off-putting effect – like ‘the defining election of our time’. But some publications do have a galvanising effect, and one of them is Dial M for Murdoch, written by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman, and published (with laudable speed) by Allen Lane. For this reader – this anxious addict of the print media – it’s o ... (read more)

Peter Rose reviews 'Bring up the Bodies' by Hilary Mantel

June 2012, no. 342 • 28 May 2012

Royals, it seems, have their tenacious uses, often fictive. Contemporaries such as Alan Bennett and Edward St Aubyn have deployed them. One hundred years ago, Ford Madox Ford wrote his singular trilogy (1906–08) about Katharine Howard, The Fifth Queen of Henry VIII. Now the esteemed novelist and memoirist Hilary Mantel returns to the Tudor world, again with revisionist intent. Wolf Hall, publis ... (read more)

Patrick White – ‘Edges slightly rubbed’

From the Editor’s Desk • 28 May 2012

  While the Brits prepare to traipse up and down The Mall brandishing their Union Jacks and Coronation Chicken to fête our remote head of state’s Diamond Jubilee, what better way to mark a rather more momentous local milestone – the centenary of Patrick White’s birthday (28 May 2012) – than by reading the man again, and reading one’s favourite book by him, after more years than on ... (read more)