Non Fiction
The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes ushered in the modern world by William Egginton
The four-hundredth anniversary of Miguel de Cervantes’s death serves as a good reminder of the influence and importance of his oeuvre, and perhaps too of our strange obsession with ...
... (read more)Flâneuse: Women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London by Lauren Elkin
As we step out of the house,’ writes Virginia Woolf, in her 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting’, ‘we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of ...
... (read more)City Dreamers: The urban imagination in Australia by Graeme Davison
In The Oxford Companion to Australian History, of which he was a co-editor with John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre, Graeme Davison begins his essay on Geoffrey Blainey by saluting him ...
... (read more)In the opening piece of his book of collected essays, the novelist and photography critic Teju Cole feels briefly possessed by the spirit of James Baldwin who, like him, travelled outside the ...
... (read more)Freeing Peter: How an ordinary family fought an extraordinary battle by Juris Greste et al.
It seems appropriate in an account of justice thwarted that the name of journalist Peter Greste’s father is Juris. In 2013, Greste, an Al Jazeera journalist, was accused with colleagues ...
... (read more)John Curtin occupies the top tier in the pantheon of Australian national leaders. ‘Expert’ rankings of former officer holders – a practice lately imported from the United States, where ...
... (read more)In an extraordinary year for British politics the gloriously unexpected triumph of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party’s leadership election in September 2015 probably ranks ...
... (read more)Inside the Art Market: Australia’s galleries: A history 1956–1976 by Christopher Heathcote
Like any good storyteller, Christopher Heathcote begins by setting the scene: ‘one of those scruffy unpaved streets on the outer fringe’ of Melbourne on a wintry day in 1956 ...
... (read more)The Art of Rivalry: Four friendships, betrayals, and breakthroughs in modern art by Sebastian Smee
It seems a particularly masculine take on the processes of art to examine the way rivalry spurs on creativity and conceptual development. Yet this is not the book the Boston Globe’s ...
... (read more)‘You might ask how a man who spent his days with the major poems of Browning could wish to spend his evenings with the minor movies of Chow Yun-fat,’ Clive James asks ...
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