Friendship between women is ideal. It is affectionate and nurturing, founded on generosity and mutual love. It is intimate and loyal, because you can tell your best friend anything and she won’t betray you. It lasts a lifetime.

The trial of Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton in 1870 might have been designed for the media to whip up public outrage in a familiar mix of moral disapproval and prurient detail. As Neil McKenna’s Fanny and Stella reveals, this was indeed the intention of the British government of the day.

Julia Gillard’s magnificent tirade against Tony Abbott in parliament last year has given Anne Summers her title for The Misogyny Factor, a polemic on the landscape of sexism and disadvantage in Australia based on two of her own recent speeches. Hillary Clinton’s distinction between progress (the signs of how far we have come) and success (enduring c ...

Public Sydney: Drawing the City is a large and beautiful book. Its size recalls William Hardy Wilson’s Old Colonial Architecture in New South Wales and Tasmania (1924) and other folio-sized books produced by architect–authors such as Andrea Palladio ...

When Paul Raphael Montford (1868–1938) settled in Melbourne in 1923, one press report claimed that he was ‘one of England’s best-known sculptors’, but despite having created works for the façade of the Victoria and Albert Museum and for Westminster Abbey, as well as numerous public sculptures in Australia, his work is not well known in either country. ...

We are used to modern science being conducted as a collaborative effort involving teams of researchers in laboratories, but imagine a huge research project requiring thousands of researchers and covering every corner of an entire continent (and beyond) being organised successfully with no telephone or Internet.

Anyone who has seen one of Röntgen’s ingenious writing desks, where at a single touch many springs and hinges come into motion, so that the writing surface and implements, pigeon holes for letters and money appear simultaneously, or in quick succession … can imagine how that palace unfolded, into which my sweet companion now drew me.

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Edwardian Opulence is the book for the sumptuous survey exhibition of Edwardian art which was shown at the Yale Centre for British Art from 28 February to 2 June 2013. It is a sweeping look at the visual arts in Britain in all its manifestations during the period roughly corresponding with the reign of Edward VII. This substantial book contains ...

Turner posed a conundrum when he withheld nothing from his bequest to the nation. On the positive side, the unsorted contents gave room to later, highly flattering interpretations of Turner, which a collection pruned to the taste of the Victorians would not have supported. On the downside, the digestive processes of posterity took Turner away from his roots in ...