Tag Archives: Nonfiction

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 …

Many people have quite heated positions on the subject of the new European Constitution but to my way of thinking, it’s such a simple no-brainer that at times it’s hard to remember what all the fuss is about. The proposed reforms will strengthen my rights as a citizen of the …

Aroma begins with an idea that pulled me up short: Smell is a cultural, hence a social and historical, phenomenon.

Just discovered the writer Thomas Burke, through a random selection at the London Library of his The London Spy, 1922. It is a wander around the streets, with a strong focus on the East End and the seamier sides of life, typical of his work – in fact he was …

I’ve never really gotten into the Mona Lisa; its iconic status seems so much a matter of historical accident rather than any reflection on its merits, and trying to see it in the Louvre is such a scramble that it hardly seems worth the effort. But I was fascinated to …

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, …

It was 1658. Agnes Bowker, 27, a spinster and domestic servant found herself with a difficult, but hardly unusual problem ...

Two books about the horrible things done to girls, most often by other girls. One is the application of the label “school slut”. Now I think about it, every school, college and similar collection of adolescents or young adults with which I have been involved had a school slut, or, …

One of my most surprising, “whow” books of 2004, was The Fossil Hunters, by Adrienne Mayor. Posted on my blog is a reconstruction of the skeleton of a Protoceratops, a dinosaur that lived in what is now the Gobi desert. Below is a Scythian “griffin”, placed into the same stance. …