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ABR Arts

Book of the Week

On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is shaping China and the world
China

On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is shaping China and the world by Kevin Rudd

How does Xi Jinping think? China’s leader since late 2012 is one of the most important but least accessible people in the world. He does not give interviews. His lieutenants do not leak to reporters. His associates do not write tell-all memoirs. The Chinese Communist Party is a secretive organisation that dominates the country’s information ecosystem by censoring speech and crushing dissent. We therefore know precious little about how decisions get made in Beijing.

Interview

Calibre Essays

From the Archive

February 2008, no. 298

A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900 edited by Nicholas Birns and Rebecca McNeer

When G.B. Barton presented his two works concerning the literary history of New South Wales to the Paris Exhibition of 1866, he hoped that they would enable readers ‘to form an exact idea of the progress, extent and prospects of literary enterprise among us’. The words are succinct, unobjectionable, and their sentiments influenced much of the literary history of the next century, much as the productions of that time were usually annals rather than analysis. Barton’s civic-minded project linked the maturing of Australian literature with its political culture. Implicit in his endeavour, though numerous others would use the metaphor outright, was the notion of ‘coming-of-age’. This chimera had as long a life as the search for the Great Australian Novel.

From the Archive

May 2010, no. 321

A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel

During 2007 I became enamoured of podcasting. The Canadian Broadcasting Commission’s Big Ideas and Elaine Wachtel’s Writers and Company were among my favourite programs and I would podcast these each week, irrespective of the topic or the interviewee. Thus I heard Alberto Manguel’s CBC Massey Lectures, a series of five wonderful presentations collectively titled ‘The City of Words’. It was not simply the content of these lectures; Manguel’s delivery is lyrical, intimate, andante and almost shockingly seductive. These lectures worked on me as reading does, drawing me in and then spinning me out to numerous other readings. Some of the books prompted by the lectures were rereadings, such as Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Borges’s stories others were new to me, and some, including Gilgamesh, had long been on my must-read list. Manguel provided the necessary nudge.

From the Archive

December 1990–January 1991, no. 127

Nights with Grace by Rosie Scott & Strange Objects by Gary Crew

My acid test of a good novel is how long the characters reverberate in the consciousness after the book has been put down. After I read both these books, I carried Grace Starr and Steven Messenger around in my head for weeks – both of them dangerous and mysterious persons, but in very different ways.