Listener 12 May, 2001.

Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money

Richard’s Brattigan’s four hour film of Hamlet included bits of the plot which are often omitted in the cut version of the play. I was particularly struck how the invasion of Denmark by Prince Fortibras of Norway, suggests that the events at Court at Elsinor were but petty politicking. I had similar feelings while reading the New Zealand media pages on the internet while I was overseas. The nation’s main concerns seemed to be the activities of various members of parliament and their spouses. Now, just as there is a problem if one suspects one’s stepfather has bumped off one’s father and taken over his job, it is important we have honest and competent politicians. But perhaps the economic storms outside the country deserved a little more attention.

Listener 2 September 2000

Keywords: Literature; Social Policy;

This column is written more in sorrow than anger. Hopes were high when the then Leader of the Opposition, Helen Clark, announced that on assuming the premiership she would also take the Arts and Culture ministerial portfolio. The National Government had been squeezing public spending and that, with the appointments it was making, was generating an authoritarian, politically correct, and backward-looking distribution of the limited funds and leadership in the arts and heritage sector. Hopes were exceeded with Clark’s announcement of some $86m funding for the next three years, although much was a catch-up of the deficit arising from the miserliness of the previous government.

C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ is a parable about the economy.
.Listener 2 January 1999.

Keywords: Literature and Culture;

A hundred years ago, scholar, critic, novelist, C.S. (Clive Stapleton) Lewis was born. Like his close Oxford friend, J.R.R. Tolkien (of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), Lewis was an Oxford professor. He is best known for his religious writings (notably The Screwtape Letters and The Four Loves), a science-fiction trilogy, his autobiography A Grief Observed, which became a film Shadowlands, and his Chronicles of Narnia for children, especially The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which was turned into a film. Lewis’s greatest work of scholarship was The Allegory of Love, about the courtly love tradition of medieval times.

Listener 7 November, 1998.

Keywords: Literature and Culture;

The economy is not the ultimate end of human existence, so it would be wrong to justify the arts solely in terms of economics. Yet insofar as the arts require resources funded by the public purse, its public funding has to be subject to economic scrutiny.

Listener: 28 December, 1996.

Keywords: Literature and Culture;

What Results When a Poet Tackles Economics

Listener: 28 October, 1995.

Keywords: Literature and Culture;

It is hard to provide concrete images of the economy, as is evident from the boring covers on most economics books. The title and author may be in large letters, or perhaps there are graphs and diagrams, but a compelling image is rare.

by Carol Markwell, directed by Phillip Mann and Jo Kahl, Suter Gallery Theatre, Nelson.

Listener: 21 January, 1995.

Keywords: Literature and Culture;

A central problem in women’s suffrage year was how to recognize all women and not just the good and the great: ordinary women and their experiences, like falling in love, getting pregnant, and getting jilted. Real enough events to tens of thousands of women, illustrative of the economic and biological asymmetry of the genders, but largely ignored officially or, if remembered, deplored.

Listener: 7 May, 1994.

Keywords: Literature and Culture;

Economists were once thought to be among the liberal and progressive sections of the intelligentsia. Today they are thought of as curmudgeonly philistines. As a mild protest I thought I should write about the poet and pamphleteer John Milton, who lived in the 17th century, more than 100 years before the word economy gained the meaning it has today. England then had about the same population as New Zealand today, but it was more rural, with London, the largest city, about half the size of Christchurch.

Listener: 22 December, 1984.

Keywords: Literature and Culture;

It is strange to recall the public outcry caused by the arrival of abstraction in painting. We now accept that form and colour are relevant and important. Abstract painting is now safe, for while it challenges us intellectually there is – as with landscapes – a distance between the picture and our human preoccupations. Where then does the painter af social realism, the commentator an our lives, fit in? Not in the boardroom or the living-room; paintings which glare at us, challenging the way we live, do. not belong in those places – do. they?