Seven Worlds will Collide
“It’s like stumbling into your own birthday party – you don’t know where to look first. Centre stage is Neil Finn, hair greying but still a hint of that haphazard Crowded House quiff, a…
Tag Archives: Guardian (The)
Travel Happy
What’s good about Greymouth? It’s close to captivating glaciers and the bottle shop sells fill-you-own beer, sherry and port.
Curtain falls for Nyree Dawn Porter
“Forsyte sex symbol who conquered the world”, Kiwi-born and raised star of the 60’s TV show The Forsyte Saga (watched by 100 milllion people in 26 countries) remembered in The Telegraph, The Guardian and…
Disappearing Visitors
“There are reputed to be certain towns in New Zealand and Australia where if you shout out a name in the street, someone will instinctively turn round, then nervously jerk their head away. They’ve briefly been drawn…
Public Interest
Once watched as the world’s greatest free-market experiment, New Zealand is leading the way in getting democracy out from under the corporate thumb says prominent intellectual Noreena Hertz.
Dream Catcher
New Zealand-born psychotherapist Helen McLean turns dreams into reality writing multiple books and creating work-place training based on what your brain does at night.
Doubtful Honour
Big Norm Hewitt’s in-yer-face rendition of the All Black haka and English hooker Richard ‘Cocky’ Cockerill’s gracious eyeball-to-eyeball acceptance makes the Guardian’s list of the “top-ten sporting feuds”.
Strange Happenings in Rugby
“Somewhere in the depths of the very European Six Nations Championship, two New Zealanders have been having some pretty bizarre experiences.”
Inside the Frame
Michael King’s biography of Janet Frame, “laureate of the musing inner-self,” is “elegantly written, densely researched and remorselessly long” – but does it over-expose its subject?
Netjetters in New Zealand
Two of the Guardian’s globe-trotting “Netjetters” are lassoed by Aotearoa’s lures and both have trouble getting back on the plane. Sue jetboats in Queenstown, visits her first rodeo and is “very sorry to leave” and Milly finds…
Kiwi batter?
Will Russell Crowe step up to the crease for Somerset this season, or is it just that funny time of year?
Take a Break
Lunch breaks are best – eating at your desk makes the office “sound like the boiling muds of New Zealand”.
Poker Philosophy
Did Wittgenstein threaten Popper with a red-hot poker in Cambridge 55 years ago? New Zealand academic Dr Peter Munz was there…
Clever Kea
The inhospitable alpine environment has caused the kea to develop “a very human-like curiosity and flexibility”.
Hot Lodge!
Old-world charm is losing out to “far-flung destinations favoured by the elite such as game lodges in South Africa, Caribbean idylls, palatial hotels in India and New Zealand lodges.
Best Oscar Hunter
The greatest winners of all time. For best actress: Vivien Leigh, Joan Crawford, Audrey Hepburn, Simone Signoret and Holly Hunter in The Piano.
Edge Eden
Cornwall’s bio-dome Eden Project houses vegetation from every part of the planet – including the edge.
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”.
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…
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.
Kingsley Link
Phil Kingsley-Jones manages Jonah – his son, Kingsley Jones, has been likened to All Black Josh Kronfeld.
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.
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…
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.
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.”
