Skip to content
Inside Story
About
Donate
Sign up
Search
Search
Menu
About
Donate
Sign up
Search
Search
biography
Essays & reportage
In search of Cinquevalli
David Hayes
14 July 2018
On the centenary of his death, it’s time for a supreme world-crossing entertainer to take his place in history
Books & arts
Her mother’s secrets
Susan Lever
13 July 2018
Books
| Nadia Wheatley discovers her mother’s two great loves
Books & arts
Interruptions
Sara Dowse
9 July 2018
Books
| Two writers grapple with the demands of motherhood, real and imagined
International
“Here we are, living it again, as though we didn’t learn our lesson”
Margaret Simons
4 July 2018
Profile
| Filipino senator Risa Hontiveros faces jail for protecting witnesses to a brutal state-sponsored killing. Has the country’s politics come full circle?
From the archive
Speaking into the silence
Drusilla Modjeska
2 July 2018
Two compelling works of hybrid non-fiction explore how the past lives on in the present
Books & arts
On the wrong side of history
Graeme Smith
26 June 2018
Books
| Journalist Scott Tong has unearthed an alternative history of China’s twentieth century
Books & arts
The year of living anxiously
Graeme Davison
26 June 2018
Phillipa McGuinness chronicles a year when time sped up
Books & arts
Home truths
Ruth Balint
19 June 2018
Books
| Sofija Stefanovic’s laugh-out-loud memoir explores life between homelands
Books & arts
The journo who never got away
Michael Cannon
5 June 2018
Books
| Murdoch lieutenant Les Hinton doesn’t burn
all
his bridges in his frank new memoir
Books & arts
Australian diplomacy’s creation story
Graeme Dobell
23 May 2018
Books
| Two diplomats — one a restless innovator, the other “a master of benign neglect” — helped shape Australia’s opening up to the world
Books & arts
Citizen Jones
Brian McFarlane
1 May 2018
Cinema
| As much a performance as a documentary, this new film captures a remarkable mind
From the archive
The lost portrait
Sylvia Martin
23 April 2018
A single image can open up an unexplored part of a subject’s life, writes the biographer of writer and activist Aileen Palmer
From the archive
When did I grow up?
Deborah Cheetham
18 April 2018
It’s still happening, says the Yorta Yorta composer of
Pecan Summer
Essays & reportage
Murder in bohemia
Gideon Haigh
12 April 2018
Extract
| Hidden behind the scandal of Mollie Dean’s death was a story worth telling
Books & arts
Parallel lives
Brett Evans
11 April 2018
Books
| The former academic and the pugnacious ex-soldier both tell compelling stories about life before politics
Essays & reportage
Invisible women
Michelle Scott Tucker
8 April 2018
The story of Elizabeth Macarthur, a driving force in early New South Wales, highlights gaps in the story of colonial Australia
Essays & reportage
Her childhood friends
Sue Taffe
28 March 2018
Extract
| A new biography probes the remarkable life of the Indigenous rights campaigner Mary Montgomerie Bennett
Books & arts
The politician as hero
Jane Goodall
19 February 2018
Our TV critic reviews the ABC’s two-part documentary
Hawke: The Larrikin and the Leader
, first screened in February 2018
Essays & reportage
The undiplomatic diplomat
Alan Fewster
8 February 2018
Extract
| Posted to Chungking in 1941, Keith Waller found his allies almost as challenging as the enemy
Books & arts
Was Derek Freeman “mad”?
Martha Macintyre
28 January 2018
The controversial critic of anthropologist Margaret Mead was a man driven to extremes
Books & arts
An Iced VoVo and a broken heart
Frank Bongiorno
5 January 2018
Books
| Beyond the headlines it generated, Kevin Rudd’s memoir helps explain why he lost the prime ministership
From the archive
The destiny of Eileen Joyce
Andrew Ford
27 December 2017
Despite her international fame, the Tasmanian-born pianist’s career was cut short by a conservative musical establishment
From the archive
How Harold Holt was lost
Tom Griffiths
17 December 2017
A chance encounter anticipated the shocking disappearance of a prime minister on 17 December 1967
Books & arts
Inside the tent
Jock Given
7 December 2017
Books
| Is Gareth Evans’s “incorrigible optimism” evidence-based?
Books & arts
Historian of the present
Peter Browne
5 December 2017
Ken Inglis was not only a widely admired historian but also a gifted reporter and a sharp-eyed pioneer of press criticism
Books & arts
Farewell, Sylvia
Peter Browne
9 November 2017
Over a long career, Sylvia Lawson was a prolific contributor to newspapers and magazines, including the pioneering
Nation
, and
Inside Story
Books & arts
Demanding the impossible
Tom O'Regan
8 November 2017
An appreciation of journalist, critic and film industry activist Sylvia Lawson, who died this week
From the archive
A small cedar box
Brenda Niall
3 November 2017
Extract
| A puzzling gift sends one of Australia’s leading biographers on a journey into her family’s past
Books & arts
A fine balance
Maruta Rodan
15 October 2017
Books
| Sheila Fitzpatrick brilliantly illuminates her subject and his tumultuous times
Books & arts
The Dasher
Frank Bongiorno
10 October 2017
What will Sam Dastyari do if he’s given a second chance? His autobiography only hints at an answer
Newer posts
Older posts