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From souvenir shops to art galleries, First Nations designs are big business. Australia’s Productivity Commission estimates about $250 million of Indigenous-style art and consumer products are sold annually. But just 16% of that ends up in the hands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists.

A speech in a play by Shakespeare or one of his contemporaries can be as short as a word or as long as several hundred, or anything in between. But what is the most common length?

The time and money spent on college can often be used more productively.

Many people think Nazi Germany was beaten only through military violence, and mainly by men. As Barack Obama said in 2009: “Nonviolence could not have halted Hitler’s armies”. In fact, non-violent action was widely used in resisting Nazism. Brave women often led it. They later got little recognition, though this…

The anniversary of the Armenian Genocide is marked every year on April 24. That was the date in 1915 when hundreds of Armenian community leaders were arrested by the government of the Ottoman Empire in the capital Constantinople, now known as Istanbul.

“Every once in a while a book lands on your desk that changes the way you perceive the world you live in, a book that fundamentally challenges your understanding of human history.” So began the blurb that came with this book. Aha! I thought. The usual advertising hyperbole, a gross…

Being diagnosed came as a complete shock. You do not imagine that you are going to go into a school to teach children and come out with an industrial disease.

Recent excavations at the Villa of the Quintilii uncovered the remains of a unique winery just outside Rome.

One of my favourite Roman artefacts to show visiting school groups or beginner’s Latin classes is a floor mosaic from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii. The mosaic depicts a chained dog accompanied by the Latin words, CAVE CANEM (“beware of the dog”).

As utopian oases dry up, a desert of banality, and bewilderment spreads …

Richard Glazar insisted that no one survived the Holocaust without help. To this Prague-born Jewish survivor, who endured Nazi imprisonment at Treblinka and Theresienstadt, plus years in hiding, it was impossible to persevere without others’ support. Glazar conceded that some of his fellow Treblinka survivors were “loners,” but he nevertheless…