Tag Archives: Biography

Early Australian history is usually told as a male-dominated story, and it is remarkable how often this is a story of male failure – Burke and Wills et al. The women who do appear are usually painted in lurid colours as prostitutes and slatterns, or as the odd lonely, isolated …

In the second volume of the memoirs of Jill Ker Conway, first female president of Smith College, she has just arrived in America. She starts off being perhaps unsurprisingly gushy about Harvard, after Fifties Sydney: “Within weeks I began to see myself as perfectly normal, like all the other lively …

Hello To All That: A Memoir of War, Zoloft, and Peace recounts in time-shifting chapters the author’s depression, pharmaceutical cure, and subsequent formative experience as a freelance war correspondent reporting from the siege of Sarajevo in 1993-4. The parallel stories are interesting and vividly told. But readers expecting something heavy, …

I’ve always thought of Piranesi as a sculptor; when I look several times a week at the giant, spectacular, if rather ugly “Piranesi vase”, which towers above your head in a riot of decorated marble in the Enlightenment gallery in the British Museum, that’s perhaps not surprising, but I’m learning …

I’ve already found one of my books of 2005, The King’s Midwife: A History and Mystery of Madame du Coudray, by Nina Rattner Gelbart. On my site is the map assembled by the author (from ten years of research, primarily in French provincial archives) of the travels of Mme Coudray …

The time of Alexander draws nigh (November 24 to be precise), Oliver Stone’s epic historical biopic of one of the greatest and most enigmatic figures in history. Click on the above banner for every manner of interactive doo-dad and gizmo relating to the film, starring a blonde Colin Farrell as …

I recall the gut-punch impact Studs Terkel’s book Working had on me when I read it as a teenager: I had never realized so many people actually worked in “menial” jobs, nor that there is dignity and self-respect in dong ANY job well. It meshed neatly with my understanding of …

Like Christopher Ricks, newly elected professor of poetry at Oxford, and the Warren Professor of Humanities at Boston University, who has a new book out on the subject that many might consider … granular: In a corner by the desk there is also a boom box. Mr. Ricks brings this …

Clinton book "campaign" begins

I voted for Bill Clinton twice and was happy to do so – he did a lot of things right (NAFTA, welfare reform, race relations) and was lucky as well (the economy). As we all know, it is better to be lucky than to be good. But by the time …