Biography
Janna Thompson reviews 'Hume: An intellectual biography' by James A. Harris
David Hume earned his place in the philosophical pantheon mostly because of the uncompromising empiricism of his early work A Treatise of Human Nature (1738). He looked ...
... (read more)Kevin Foster reviews Phillip Schuler: The remarkable life of one of Australia’s greatest war correspondents' by Mark Baker
Who was Phillip Schuler? A war correspondent for The Age, his six-week visit to Gallipoli in July and August 1915 produced, inter alia, a few of the rare eyewitness accounts of the battle ...
... (read more)Miriam Cosic reviews 'Hitler: A biography, volume I: Ascent, 1889–1939' by Volker Ullrich and translated by Jefferson Chase
There is a point of view that says we shouldn't humanise a tyrant such as Adolf Hitler since that reduces the symbolism, the power of his name as a synonym for pure evil, and can lead to ...
... (read more)Dennis Altman reviews 'The House that Jack Built: Jack Mundey, Green Bans hero' by James Colman
The term 'green ban', first used in 1973, is so much part of our political vocabulary that we forget it has a specific and Australian genesis, which had considerable influence on the Greens ...
... (read more)Rachel Fuller reviews 'The Worst Woman in Sydney: The life and crimes of Kate Leigh' by Leigh Straw
The Worst Woman in Sydney is the first biography devoted to the early twentieth-century Sydney underworld matriarch Kate Leigh. Leigh Straw attempts to tease out ...
... (read more)Brenda Niall reviews 'Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a lady novelist' by Anne Boyd Rioux
If Constance Fenimore Woolson is remembered today, it is likely to be as a friend of Henry James, and a minor character in his much-chronicled life. Anne Boyd Rioux's ...
... (read more)Simon Caterson reviews 'Brett Whiteley: Art, life and the other thing' by Ashleigh Wilson
Notwithstanding the fact that he died alone in a hotel room following a heroin overdose at the age of fifty-three, Brett Whiteley led what for an Australian artist ...
... (read more)Robin Gerster reviews 'Our Man Elsewhere: In search of Alan Moorehead' by Thornton McCamish
You have to admire the professional writer who describes the chore of churning out the daily ration of words as 'like straining shit through a sock', ...
... (read more)Peter Heerey reviews 'Tom Hughes QC: A cab on the rank' by Ian Hancock
The subtitle of this compellingly readable biography of Thomas Eyre Forrest Hughes AO QC borrows the underlying philosophical metaphor of the independent Bar ...
... (read more)Kevin Rabalais reviews 'The Last Love Song: A biography of Joan Didion' by Tracy Daugherty
For many young writers, Julian Wasser's 1968 Time magazine photograph of Joan Didion posed in front of her yellow Corvette remains the epitome of cool ...
... (read more)