Peter Craven

Peter Craven reviews 'Apropos of Nothing' by Woody Allen

June–July 2020, no. 422 • 26 May 2020

Whatever you think of Woody Allen, you will probably find his memoir, Apropos of Nothing, compelling. It’s likely to convince you that he didn’t molest his adoptive daughter Dylan all those years ago. The resurgence of this accusation, first aired in 1992, has caused such widespread concern that Hachette pulled this book because of vehement objections by Ronan Farrow, Allen’s biological son ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'Daddy We Hardly Knew You' by Germaine Greer

June 1989, no. 111 • 01 June 1989

There are few people on earth I would rather read than Germaine Greer, mad or sane. Whatever reservations I might want to express about Daddy We Hardly Knew You, it is some testament to its compelling power that I read most of it strung-out with fatigue from checking proofs some time towards dawn and I still found it difficult to stop reading. Oscar Wilde cannot have been the first human being to ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'The Book Of Dust, Volume Two: The Secret Commonwealth' by Philip Pullman

March 2020, no. 419 • 21 February 2020

Philip Pullman must be one of the weirdest figures to emerge from the sometimes dark woods of children’s writing. Not the least striking thing about him is that the woods can be very dark, Dante-dark, indeed. At the same time, he does not have the ballast of those two mutually despising inklings to whom he is routinely compared, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, in having the deeper comforts of any ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'The Clean Dark' by Robert Adamson

November 1989, no. 116 • 01 November 1989

Robert Adamson has as secure a reputation as any poet in this country apart from Les Murray. He rose to prominence in the latter part of the 1960s at the same time as John Tranter, but his affinity was not with the New York poets like John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, but with the poets of Black Mountain: Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, and, most particularly, with the late Robert Duncan. Adamson took ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'The Puzzles of Childhood' by Manning Clark

October 1989, no. 115 • 01 October 1989

Manning Clark will be remembered as a historian long after the last jot and tittle of the facts he amassed have been disputed and every revisionism has had its day, proving for those with the needful faith that he made it all up, that he was a waffler, that the diorama he presented as the history of Australia was nothing but an allegory of the inside of his head, and that it was all vanity and a s ... (read more)

'Obituary for Helen Daniel' by Peter Craven

November 2000, no. 226 • 01 November 2000

Helen Daniel, the editor of Australian Book Review since 1995, died suddenly on Monday, 16 October 2000. Her death has sent waves of shock and sorrow throughout the Australian literary world. According to Andrew Riemer, at the Writers’ Week in Brisbane, held on the weekend after Helen’s death, session after session paid homage to this woman who, without vanity or arrogation, had made her name ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'A Pavane for Another Time' by Bernard Smith

November 2002, no. 246 • 01 November 2002

It’s a Proustian title, or at any rate a Powellian one, that Bernard Smith has produced for this memoir of his life in the long-ago 1940s, and, yes, there on the cover is Anthony Powell’s hero, Poussin. That’s doubly appropriate because one of the more vivid figures (though also one of the more saturnine ones) in this remembrance of things past is Anthony Blunt, great scholar of Poussin’s ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'Corfu: A novel' by Robert Dessaix

August 2001, no. 233 • 01 August 2001

In the last however many years, we have seen the rise of a kind of faction in this country which has enabled people like Drusilla Modjeska and Brian Matthews to show what scintillation and what fireworks may follow when the life of the mind (with whatever attendant discursive zigzagging) allows itself to imagine a world as well as to analyse one. It’s not too hard to say that the peculiar energy ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'Eucalyptus: A novel' by Murray Bail

June 1998, no. 201 • 01 June 1998

Murray Bail has passed muster as an important Australian novelist for quite a while now.  His 1980 novel Homesickness, with its sustained parodic conceit of Australian tourists forever entering the prefab theme park, rather than its ‘real’ original, was an early national venture into what might have been postmodernism. Holden's Performance, a good time later, was as unyielding in its come ... (read more)

Julius Caesar (Bell Shakespeare Company)

ABR Arts • 23 July 2018

Julius Caesar, first performed in 1599, dates from the period when Shakespeare was leading up to Hamlet, and its central figure Brutus, the conscientious assassin, is a bit of a rough draft for the introspective side of the Prince of Denmark, whereas Richard II, four years earlier, had been for his actorishness. The play is often first encountered in middle high school. It is one of Shakespeare’ ... (read more)