Peace can be found in writing, and that peace or consolation is a world away from a relentless stream of media that is channelled into our daily lives. It takes sacrifice. Like a guru in search of enlightenment, the writer must embark on an arduous journey, on the ship of imagination, to discover new worlds that lie hidden deep within the mind. For writers of fiction, that ship’s crew, passengers and stowaways are characters conjured up from the fantasies of the navigator who

A journalist, researching a story about separating truth from lies, interviewed a cross-section of the community to survey their opinions. And this is what they said … The Priest declared that to know the truth, you must have faith. The Atheist told the priest it is all just a fairytale. The Politician joked that the assertion by the atheist that there is no god is fake news. The Economist reassured the Politician that a dollar is worth a dollar as long as we all believ

PETER CAVE , a former leading Australian foreign correspondent, now retired after having worked as a journalist with ABC News since the 1970s, recently posted on Facebook the following expos é of AI’s complete unreliability in relation to truth - about himself. PETER CAVE: After reading that Apple has admitted defeat and is going to pay Google billions to use their AI engine rather than the one they have been trying to develop themselves to power the woeful SIRI, I decide

Response 1: If I waited until I was in the mood to write, then little would ever be written. I can only dream of disappearing off to an idyllic writing retreat, where I can while away the days mulling over ideas in the shade of a tree, overlooking the sea. In practice, I have to write in small fractures that open up in the continuum of time. I write in cafes, before swimming, while swimming, over lunch, after hours, before sunrise, on planes, buses and trains, and at bus st