VIC contributor

The title of this book refers to the battle for market dominance between the editors and publishers of two rival dictionaries, the one edited by Noah Webster and the other by Joseph Worcester. This battle took place largely between 1829 and 1864, and it was played out in the newspapers and by means of pamphlet warfare ...

In his infamous 1955 review of Patrick White’s The Tree of Man, A.D. Hope’s dismissal of the book as ‘illiterate verbal sludge’ focuses on a perceived confusion between the categories of poetry and prose. White ‘tries to write a novel as if he were writing poetry, and lyric poetry at that’, writes Hope ...

In the foundation Jean Blackburn Memorial Lecture in 2014, David Gonski observed that Australian schooling was unfairly funded – that the money wasn’t going where it was needed. To our national shame, this is not a new phenomenon. Successive governments in Australia have adopted school-funding policies for ...

Playwright and author Lucy Caldwell raises the issue of national identity early in her introduction to this long-running anthology series. She grew up in Belfast but lives in London. Her children sing Bengali nursery rhymes and celebrate Eid. She holds two passports, neither of which adequately captures who she is ...

A bookseller, Trevor, sits in his shop in Melbourne making conversation with his customers: an exasperating mixture of confessional, hesitant, deranged, and disruptive members of the public. One man stalks him, armed with an outrageous personal demand; another tries to apologise for assaulting him. The apology is almost as unnerving as the attack ...

It can be revelatory to read the original words of a famous writer and thus meet them on the page. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) has been so much quoted and written about that it might be rare even for his admirers to be exposed to his original prose at length and in context. It is a rewarding experience, especially when the writer cared so much for the ‘melody’ of his sentences ...

Democracy won the Cold War. As East Germans breached the Berlin Wall in November 1989 to screams of joy, a young KGB officer watched the concrete crash to the ground. Systematically, he destroyed sensitive Soviet diplomatic papers in the East Berlin embassy. Ten years later, that KGB officer, Vladimir Putin ...

Unlike an autobiography, which tends to be time-bound and inclusive, the memoir can wander at will in the writer’s past, searching out and shaping an idea of self. Although Geoffrey Blainey’s memoir, Before I Forget, is restricted to the first forty years of his life, its skilfully chosen episodes suggest much more ...