Books & arts
4 November 2024
A poem, a painting, a chance remark — almost anything can ignite the composer’s imagination
Books & arts
1 November 2024
Life’s binaries bleed into each other in a spirited memoir shadowed by a terminal illness
Books & arts
1 November 2024
Our reviewer savours an idiosyncratic account of the Queen, on and off duty
Books & arts
1 November 2024
A Lutheran pastor introduced to remote communities a different way of thinking about schooling for Aboriginal children
Books & arts
31 October 2024
Triple-tested in its own kitchen, the Women’s Weekly’s recipes helped shape Australian tastes. But it had its rivals
Books & arts
24 October 2024
Peter Parker has trawled widely to produce a documentary history of gay life in London from postwar repression to the hope induced by 1957’s Wolfenden report
Books & arts
17 October 2024
Two sociologists and a teacher wrestle with meritocracy
Books & arts
16 October 2024
A new biography assesses the record of Labor’s first prime minister
Books & arts
12 October 2024
How Paris’s “Terrible Year” shaped impressionist art
Books & arts
9 October 2024
Canny coalition-building fuelled the ascendancy of Indonesia’s Joko Widodo. But does his chosen successor represent continuity or change?
Books & arts
8 October 2024
A new collections of essays critiques a high-profile defence of the British Empire
Books & arts
8 October 2024
Authenticity isn’t quite the right word for what Neal Peres Da Costa is aiming to achieve
Books & arts
4 October 2024
A new account of Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial focuses on the victims of an unfathomed perpetrator
Books & arts
2 October 2024
The Joker’s journey becomes a jukebox musical
Books & arts
1 October 2024
Once described as the Zelig of Chinese politics, Zhou Enlai had an uneasy relationship with the Great Helmsman
Books & arts
24 September 2024
Memoirs of “a weaver at the loom” through four presidencies
Books & arts
23 September 2024
A double biography reveals the creative partnership between Robert Louis and Fanny Stevenson
Books & arts
20 September 2024
The erratic owner might have delivered the fatal blows, but he didn’t destroy Twitter on his own
Books & arts
19 September 2024
An immense database of early modern plays reveals “a veritable avian community, a magpie nest, each writer borrowing from each other”
Books & arts
19 September 2024
The great geopolitical struggle of our time, cold war 2.0, is cyber war and proxy war and tech war, economic face-off and nuclear brinkmanship
Books & arts
16 September 2024
Two journeys up the east coast of Australia
Books & arts
13 September 2024
The rise and fall of an experiment in self-directed learning
Books & arts
12 September 2024
Silk Road sceptic William Dalrymple argues for the centrality of India in ancient times
Books & arts
12 September 2024
A fine-grained and often funny new history of the Soviet cold war reveals an imperial power promoting itself as a friend of the global liberation struggle
Books & arts
10 September 2024
Composer Alexander Goehr swam against the postwar tide
Books & arts
10 September 2024
Dennis Glover turns to twentieth-century history in his call to arms against authoritarian populism
Books & arts
10 September 2024
How ten Australian women made lives in the country that epitomised modernity
Books & arts
9 September 2024
Drawing on experiences of personal threat, three women probe the world of online conspiracies
Books & arts
5 September 2024
Gideon Haigh explores a “submerged continent”
Books & arts
4 September 2024
Campaigners have repudiated “maternal citizenship” in favour of a continuing quest for “sexual citizenship”