Murray Sayle

After George W. Bush, the Deluge: Back to the Carboniferous

Murray Sayle, 21 June 2001

By the wise contrivance of the Author of nature, virtue is upon all ordinary occasions, even with regard to this life, real wisdom, and the surest and readiest means of obtaining both safety and advantage.

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

On 13 March President George W. Bush wrote to four Republican Senators informing them that he would not be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, aimed...

Draft Report of the 17th Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Nairobi, 4-6 April 2001

Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability

The Collapse of the Kyoto Protocol and the Struggle to Slow Global Warming
by David Victor.

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Eighty-six nations signed the protocol at the UN in New York; Clinton signed for the US at a subsequent, ineffectual meeting in Buenos Aires. Together, the signatories emit 88 per cent of excess global co2. After Kyoto, nothing much happened; the Earth got three years warmer, while everyone waited for the US to ratify. Then Bush spoke.

Japan goes Dutch: Japan’s economic troubles

Murray Sayle, 5 April 2001

It is nearly ten years since Japan was about to take over the known world. Until a month ago, the United States seemed unable to put a foot wrong. Then it, too, showed ominous signs of faltering. Can Japan’s mysterious ailment, whatever it is, be spreading? Japan came third last in the OECD’s table of industrialised and would-be industrialised member nations’ growth for 1999,...

Letter

Sharp-End Reporters

22 March 2001

Even thirty years ago, travel in rural Afghanistan was, as Jason Burke says, arduous (LRB, 22 March). I was glad of armed guards on the vegetable truck I hitched from Bamiyan to Kabul, after a friendly warning that undefended vehicles were sometimes hijacked by opium smugglers, religious zealots and plain, old-fashioned bandits – and this was in the good old days, when Afghanistan still had a king...

Letter

Utzon’s Legacy

5 October 2000

Sylvia Lawson (Letters, 30 November 2000) puts me right on the date of the death of Peter Hall, the architect who completed the Sydney Opera House. Her correction, however, is itself a year out. I said (mistakenly) that Hall died in 1989. In real, as opposed to either Sayle or Lawson fact, Hall died, according to the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, who ought to know, on 19 May 1995.

In the Tart Shop: How Sydney got its Opera House

Murray Sayle, 5 October 2000

Everything that is planned for the Opera House is based on the desire to take people from their daily routine into a world of fantasy, a world which they can share with the musicians and actors.

Jørn Utzon, July 1964

Two flicks of a saw-toothed roofline on the Olympic logo, and the world knew which city staged the games. Sydney Opera House is the only 20th-century building that has...

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