Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly...

High Europe always played at ethnic contempt because it was High Europe, and so had the strength, the authority, to make the racial rules. We great unwashed of the outer world, on the coasts of...

But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn’t ‘a nice man’, and indeed was—perhaps rightly—scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers’ work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a...

Oskar showed that virtue emerged where it would, and the sort of churchy observance bishops called for was not a guarantee of genuine humanity in a person.

But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to...

Vina e un vis, mila e singura realitate.

Personal finances are like people’s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener.

The dogs were really keening now, like Irish widows.

No olvidamos las penurias de Egipto, no olvidamos a Haman, no olvidamos a Hitler. Así como no olvidamos a los injustos, no olvidamos a los justos. Recordemos pues a Oskar Schindler.

Oskar cumplía treinta y siete años, y acababa de abrir una botella de coñac. Sobre su escritorio había un telegrama de una planta de montaje de armamentos situada cerca de Brno. Decía que las granadas...

Quien salva una sola vida, salva al mundo entero.

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

El problema es que se recuerda esta lista con una intensidad tal que su mismo ardor confunde los hechos. La lista era un bien absoluto. La lista era la vida. Más allá de sus márgenes...

The taste one gets of death in dreams I find more penetrating and atmospheric than the ordinary fear one might suffer while awake.

Even among Sedlacek’s own small cell, his Viennese anti-Nazi club, it was not imagined that the pursuit of the Jews had grown quite so systematic. Not only was the story Schindler told him startling simply...