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ABR Arts

Theatre

Gaslight 

Rodney Rigby for Newtheatricals in association with Queensland Theatre

Book of the Week

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the ancient Roman world
History

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the ancient Roman world by Mary Beard

Those Roman emperors were a funny lot: Nero with his lyre, Caligula with his speedy horse; Elagabalus with his whoopee cushion (what japes he played on guests who came to dinner!). Mary Beard’s new book spills the tea on all the well-known eccentric autocrats who ruled the Roman world. And what a bunch of oddities they were. Hard to believe that they could have wielded so much power so effectively for so long. Yet Beard’s book is not really about the tittle-tattle. It is, above all, about the idea of Rome’s emperor: that fictitious, hypocritical, and probably accidental conceit by which Octavian/Augustus contrived to be something other than a conventional king. Beard’s answer to the apparent paradox of so many weird mediocrities wielding supreme power is that Roman autocracy was, from its first moment, an act, even a sham. ‘One-man rule’ required a huge supporting, and colluding, cast – from wives and mothers to senators, slaves, and freedmen. Beard explains how the pretence was kept up during its supposedly golden phase: from Actium in 27 bce to Alexander Severus’s murder in 235 ce. Fans of ancient history will certainly enjoy her prose.

Interview

Interview

Interview

From the Archive

November 2003, no. 256

The West and China since 1500 by John S. Gregory

Jack Gregory has devoted much of his long career in China studies to teaching and studying the ways in which the West and China have interrelated. He is well qualified to write on the subject. Classes that Gregory has given in Melbourne to students attending University of the Third Age classes have inspired this book. In style and structure, it is highly suitable for teaching. The writing is clear, interesting and accessible. Though the book could have done with some pictures, it does have a map and the presentation is attractive.

From the Archive

May 1985, no. 70

Reading the Signs by Michael Wilding

This is the largest and most eclectic of Wilding’s four collections of short stories so far. Its 284 pages include stories ranging from ninety pages and two. Mostly written in the first person, they range in space between England and Australia, go back to the childhood of the narrator(s) (sometimes identified as Mike or Michael, making the autobiographical inferences irresistible) and in mode range from social realism through to the surrealistic modes of ‘What it was like, sometime

From the Archive

July 1991, no. 132

Humphrey McQueen remembers Manning Clark

Dear Manning,

I’m writing you this letter for want of better ways of continuing the conversation we’ve been having for the past eight years, sustained by weekly letters while I was in Japan. We began to walk and talk in 1983 as you were preparing for heart surgery and I wasn’t coping with a broken heart. You wanted someone to walk with, and I needed company.