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biography
Essays & reportage
Staying in the room
Hamish McDonald
21 October 2024
Can the “brainy and agile” Penny Wong counter the power of US-centric defence and security agencies?
Essays & reportage
White lies, archival truths and R.J.L. Hawke
Michael Piggott
17 October 2024
What the record reveals about the future prime minister and the ornamental pond
Books & arts
Man in the middle
Paul Rodan
16 October 2024
A new biography assesses the record of Labor’s first prime minister
Books & arts
Mao’s suave controller — or enabler?
Linda Jaivin
1 October 2024
Once described as the Zelig of Chinese politics, Zhou Enlai had an uneasy relationship with the Great Helmsman
Books & arts
Pelosi in power
Lesley Russell
24 September 2024
Memoirs of “a weaver at the loom” through four presidencies
Books & arts
Disability transcended
Jim Davidson
23 September 2024
A double biography reveals the creative partnership between Robert Louis and Fanny Stevenson
Books & arts
Stylometric Shakespeare
Robert White
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
Tomorrow’s women
Barbara Keys
10 September 2024
How ten Australian women made lives in the country that epitomised modernity
Books & arts
Speak, memory
Nick Haslam
5 September 2024
Gideon Haigh explores a “submerged continent”
Books & arts
The kin red line
Robin Jeffrey
4 September 2024
Excavating family histories in India, Pakistan and Australia
Essays & reportage
Is grown-up government enough?
Paul Strangio
3 September 2024
The puzzle of Anthony Albanese’s struggling prime ministership
Books & arts
Hawke agonistes
Brett Evans
27 August 2024
The making of a paradoxical prime minister
Books & arts
Marvellous Melbourne’s Madame Brussels
Marian Quartly
21 August 2024
Historical detective work reveals more of the life of the city’s best-known brothel-keeper
Essays & reportage
The best kind of troublemaker
Catherine Kevin
16 August 2024
Historian Judith Allen challenged the way historians do their work
Books & arts
Revisiting John Berger
Jane Goodall
12 August 2024
The influential writer and critic seen through the eyes of two friends
Books & arts
The poets’ war
Patrick Mullins
25 July 2024
Can six soldier poets help us understand the first world war anew?
Books & arts
Spy, accomplice, ghostwriter
Zora Simic
21 June 2024
How did people go missing in a historian’s family?
Books & arts
Loves of her life
Sylvia Martin
20 June 2024
Monte Punshon, the Japanophile once dubbed “the world’s oldest lesbian,” embraced the limelight in old age
Books & arts
Bingil Bay Bastard
Morag Fraser
4 June 2024
From a “pinch of guilt” emerges a fine-grained biography of a bohemian figure during a vital period of environmental activism
Books & arts
He’s not the Messiah
Robert Phiddian
23 May 2024
A former prime minister ponders providence
Books & arts
Oh, Sir Roger!
Jim Davidson
20 May 2024
The extraordinary life — and death — of Roger Casement, humanitarian and Irish patriot
Books & arts
Epistolary lives
Susan Lever
16 May 2024
Forty years of correspondence illuminates the careers of two important Australian writers
Books & arts
Working-class hero
Brett Evans
24 April 2024
Gary Stevenson’s epiphany came once he’d joined the top ranks of London’s foreign-exchange traders
Books & arts
The legendary King O’Malley
Ken Haley
10 April 2024
“Father of the Commonwealth Bank,” promoter of the national capital, North American émigré — King O’Malley created his own history
Books & arts
“I weep more at a wedding than a funeral”
Kate Fullagar
5 April 2024
The earliest bluestockings pioneered a new way of thinking about women like themselves. But what about the wider world?
Books & arts
Sealing the deal
Paul Rodan
4 April 2024
The National Party senator who campaigned against the far-right League of Rights exposes his strengths and weaknesses
Books & arts
The father of “soft power”
Graeme Dobell
28 March 2024
An eighty-year retrospective from the American academic who changed the way nations attract and argue
Books & arts
A fragment of a life
Susan Lever
28 March 2024
Charmian Clift’s most ambitious but unfinished work illuminates her childhood in coastal New South Wales
Books & arts
John Glover, born-again artist in Tasmania
Jim Davidson
27 March 2024
Ron Radford shows how an elderly Englishman became the first notable white Australian landscape painter
Books & arts
Grand days
Patrick Mullins
27 March 2024
James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s war never ended
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