Double life
UK Poet Charles Boyle’s The Age of Cardboard and String features “a poet who leads a double life in England and New Zealand”.
Tag Archives: Guardian (The)
Travel Gets Edgy
Being on the edge means being “enroute to nowhere,” but good cocktails in hot bars, great views from hot baths, wine, alps, adrenaline and Auckland’s revolving restaurant “make this one you must go to sometime”. Also,
History revised?
Controversy and acclaim for edge-director Roger Donaldson’s nuke-spook Kennedy paean 13 Days.“Yet, despite these difficulties, the film works and ought to be essential viewing for those too young to have been around in October 1962,…
One Neil
Neil Finn tours the UK and Ireland later this year in support of his album One Nil. His current mini-tour is rarking it up in London: “This one-off gig felt like a party where…
Bird DNA
“The first ever functional genome sequences from an extinct species have been mapped by scientists at Oxford University. The mitochondrial DNA sequences were obtained from two giant moa and a Madagascan elephant-bird.”
Alas, No Elias
It’s time Britain had a female judge a la New Zealand Chief Justice Sian Elias, the conspicuous lone woman on the Privy Council.
Postcards from the Edge
“Dad,” revealed the postcard from New Zealand, “went paragliding”. All it takes is a break from routine.
Tops for Jumps
Guardian netjetter Sam “takes advantage of New Zealand’s position as tops for adrenaline holidays – he’s just done a bungy jump.”
Spence of the sixties
The house of Beehive-architect Sir Basil Spence is described as “the best 1960’s space in Great Britain”.
Ringing up the gold
Lord of the Rings has brought the gold into Wellington, the city of “tearooms and sea views”. View the New Zealand setting in the round at the official site.
Too Tricky Poneke
The King William’s College quiz is “fiendishly” difficult – but one question should be easy for Wellingtonians.
Extreme Edge of Life
Thermophile archaeons thrive at temperatures hot enough to boil the flesh off your bones. Layers of extremophile life form flourish in multi-coloured rings in Rotorua’s thermal springs.
Trailer Lords
“There’s an advert currently going out on Virgin radio encouraging listeners to go to the cinema this Friday. It does urge you go to a film but only because this is the first opportunity…
Kingsley Link
Phil Kingsley-Jones manages Jonah – his son, Kingsley Jones, has been likened to All Black Josh Kronfeld.
Change your life
Get prepared for Rings-mania: Brush up on your Tolkien makes number 16 on the list of 99 ways to change your life.
Law-man
The New Zealand state schooling system set Jolyon Maugham on the path to barrister-hood in London – a profession he describes as “a great intellectual challenge”.
Dolly Good
Ron James, managing director of PPL and the closest thing Dolly has to a father, got his start at New Zealand-spawned pharmo-giant Glaxo. Now PPL is using New Zealand cows in research aiming to produce drugs to…
Never Say Die
One of Briton’s most popular MPs before being expelled from the Labour party for communist sympathies, New Zealand-born John Platt-Mills is still a practicing lawyer at 94. “Is there anything else he wants to achieve? ‘Yes, I’d…
Bungy-free Zone
“They’re funny things, kiwis – like big hedgehogs with bird bits sticking out, and they snuffle around with their heads to the ground.” An anxious Brit birdwatches as an adrenaline-free alternative to “catapulting about the place”.
Domestic goddess
Christmas brings out the “Nigella domestic goddess” in New Zealand lesbian-crime writer Stella Duffy.
AL&D ‘indispensable’
“Arts and Letters Daily triumphantly confirms its founder’s original hypothesis – that there is a cornucopia of wonderful writing out there on the web…but its success is mainly due to the way it met…
Professional Holiday
New Zealand is a top destination for young professionals seeking “cultural interest” and somewhere they’ve never been before.
Sane Dolly
PPL Therapeutics, the company that brought the world Dolly, hooks up with New Zealand company Celentis to clone cows in a BSE-free environment.
Manly, subtle Crowe
“We already knew from The Insider that Crowe was a fine, subtle, vanity-free actor, happy to ruin his looks to play pudgy and useless. But Gladiator and Proof of Life prove that he’s also a great movie…
Go Native?
A beer ad showing beach babes “going native”, (doing a haka), has been withdrawn from British TV after being branded insensitive and racist.
Tom the Pole
Stationed in New Zealand in 191, Irish Navy-man Tom Crean managed to get a place in Scott’s Antarctic expedition.
Temping It
An influx of hard-working New Zealand and Australian temps has lifted industry standards in the UK.
Netjetters to NZ
New Zealand features on the itinerary for the winners of the Guardian‘s netjetters competition.
Edge of Menace
New Zealand-born lawyer Denise Kingsmill, new deputy chairwoman of the UK’s Competition Commission, relishes her title as “the most feared woman in Britain”.
Thatcher Revisited
Ten years after the fall of the Iron Lady, her policies still reverberate around the globe: “More than £4bn of assets have been privatised in countries as diverse as the Czech republic and New Zealand.” …
Vagana Captured
The Bradford Bulls League team have extra muscle in the form of 18-stone Joe Vagana, ex-Warriors. “Joe’s capture will send ripples across the game,” says Bradford coach Brian Noble.
Power Dressing #2
Dress for Success provides smart clothes for UK, US and NZ women looking for jobs. “This isn’t about ‘ladies who lunch’ sprinkling love and charity on the poor. The Dress for Success thing is…
Macpac Knack
Macpacs made their reputation being hauled up and down New Zealand mountains. They’re also good for gentle English country walks.
League of Their Own
The Aotearoa Maori League team is “modelled on the Maori battalion,” says John Tamihere. “It will be a team of origin not of residence. And that’s great, it doesn’t matter if they’re on Mars, they’re still Maori.”
Guy Pearce’s Kiwi Dad
Yes, Guy is an Australian (he spent fours years on Neighbours to prove it), but his father was a New Zealander who tested planes for the Royal Air Force. Pearce, also Russell Crowe’s side-kick…
Temping: A Permanent Way of Life
“Temping” is a phase in the life of many young Kiwis, but some, like Tracey Ward who is profiled in this article, are beginning to see it as a flexible, stimulating career in itself….
Stirling Effort
British energy companies are looking at the Stirling engine produced by NZ company WhisperTech. By 2025, 13m households in Britain could have their own little power station installed with this technology.
Flaming Fox
“It’s difficult to pin down Kerry Fox. For every film-goer who knows her as the murderous medical student in Shallow Grave, there’s another who remembers her as the dumpy author Janet Frame in An Angel…
Beefsteaks Ruled by Women
Women currently fill the highest offices in New Zealand. Some people find this rather incongruous. “…this progress might be thought a bit of a shock for a country famous for beefy rugby players, not…
Learning from Grandma and the “Notorious” Truby King
A expectant grand-daughter ponders generational attitudes to child-rearing, musing on her grandmother’s strict training under New Zealander Truby King”: ” is the Aunt Sally for almost all post-war child-rearing books … His doctrines were adopted across the…
The Gould Standard
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Waikato and former British Labour spokesman Bryan Gould offers his perspective on one of the most heated debates in British politics – the integration of European currency and urges Blair’s government to…
Edge Affirmation from Elaine Showalter
The Princeton University feminist icon and scholar writes on effect of globalisation on national identity: “If one is an expatriate from, say, New Zealand”, as American Political scientist Daniel Bell notes, “one can click…
Superplonk
Is Cloudy Bay the new Champagne? “An utterly gob-smackingly gorgeous bubbly … Track down the 1995 vintage of Pelorus, from the Cloudy Bay bunch in New Zealand. A massive advance … this is one of the most…
Just Add Soap and Hey Presto: 20m Geyser!
In the notes and queries section of the Guardian a reader enquires about the practice of putting soap down geyser spouts to stimulate eruption. Leo Pyle elaborates on the science of the practice by refering to…
Poetic shock tactics
An extensive Guardian profile of New Zealand poet Fleur Adcock that elaborates on everything from her OBE, the end of her muse, her relationship with Barry Crump (“New Zealand’s answer to George Best or…
Hallertau hops give organic beer a bite
Bateman’s a family owned organic brewery in Lincolnshire has joined the swelling ranks of organic beers with Yella Betty Bitter, brewed with organic chariot pale malt and Hallertau hops from New Zealand – “wonderfully…
Guinness Peat Told to Bugger off and Have a Beer
New Zealand listed corporate raider Guinness Peat’s edge proved too sharp at Young & Co (Britain’s oldest brewery), after chairman John Young turned the screws on them using megaphone diplomacy. Despite having support from ‘A’ investors, private…
Immunising Roadkill to Protect Livestock?
Imagine a countryside filled with possum traps, not designed to kill, but to entice the pesky pest in for a quick facial spray to vaccinate them against bovine TB. Hailing some edge thinking the Guardian writes: “It…
Rutherford and Oliphant: the Physics of the Affair
From tree-pruning to atom bombs, on the death of physicist Sir Mark Oliphant the Guardian remembers the contribution his friendship with Sir Ernest Rutherford made to Twentieth Century science, ” greatest personal triumphs in science came in…
Pass the Budder
The Guardian explores the new linguistic imperialism and the effects of media on language: a New Zealand researcher has found that, under the influence of programmes like Eastenders, increased glottalisation of the dialect has occured….
So Far – So Good
The discerning readers of the Guardian and Observer have voted New Zealand as their favourite long-haul travel destination. “It is the Caribbean and the English countryside, Antarctica and California, Sydney and Gleneagles all rolled into one….
Vodka and herb, a très moderne kiwi potable
The Guardian blows away the myth that herbs are restrained by the cooking pot and salad bowl and offers some herbal cocktails for the urban sophisticate, including herb-based martinis from Dick Bardsell and vodka…
Party-on in ‘one of the Hippest Cities on the Pacific Rim’
The Guardian reports that Auckland, ‘more like the Riviera than the outskirts of Polynesia’, is having a hard time coming down from the highs of the America’s Cup victory. All part of ‘a burgeoning café culture to challenge…
From the Edge to the (Medical) Centre: Kiwi Brings Tibetan Medicine to Chelsea
New Zealand born Christopher Hansard, is medical director of the newly opened Eden Medical Centre in London’s King’s Road. It aims to blend Dur Bon, a Tibetan form of medicine, with Western conventional and complementary systems.
