Skip to content
Inside Story
About
Donate
Sign up
Search
Search
Menu
About
Donate
Sign up
Search
Search
biography
Books & arts
Clash of the titans
Paul Rodan
8 September 2023
Doc Evatt may have won the battle over banning the Communist Party but Bob Menzies was the ultimate victor
Books & arts
Grand days
Susan Lever
1 September 2023
Frank Moorhouse’s first biographer captures a life in motion
Books & arts
A triumph and a burden
Sylvia Martin
30 August 2023
“My Country” shadowed the career of poet Dorothea Mackellar
Books & arts
Living toughly
Anne-Marie Condé
28 August 2023
Sydney’s best-known bohemian lived entirely by her own rules
Books & arts
Straddling a barbed-wire fence
Paul Rodan
25 August 2023
A new biography reveals Tim Fischer to have been a more complex figure than he might have seemed
Books & arts
The first succession… and its consequences
Tom Greenwell
15 August 2023
Two new books reveal the intriguing origins of Rupert Murdoch’s global empire
Essays & reportage
The making of a prime minister
Frank Bongiorno
15 August 2023
How did Australia’s thirty-first PM make it to the Lodge?
Books & arts
Doing “the work that men do”
Stephen Mills
9 August 2023
Two talented Liberal senators paved the way for future female ministers
Books & arts
Donald Horne, citizen intellectual
Frank Bongiorno
4 August 2023
A compelling biography captures the trajectory of the man who named the lucky country
Books & arts
Eye of the storm
Linda Atkins
2 August 2023
How much of an author’s experience of an abortion do we have a right to read about?
Books & arts
Sense and sensibility
Sara Dowse
17 July 2023
Philosopher Clare Carlisle chronicles the interaction of George Eliot’s public voice and private life
Books & arts
Buckle and strain
Patrick Mullins
14 July 2023
In probing the shortcomings of George Orwell’s biographers has Anna Funder fallen into traps of her own?
Books & arts
The self-fashioning of George Orwell
Peter Marks
13 July 2023
A new biography probes the gap between the kind of person the writer was and the kind of person he imagined himself to be
Books & arts
Memoirs of a Middle East tragic
Graeme Dobell
12 July 2023
A summing up by an Australian diplomat who loved the Arab world
Books & arts
Late bloomer
Zora Simic
10 July 2023
Singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams’s memoir is an instant classic
Books & arts
Fantales
Desley Deacon
4 July 2023
How Errol Flynn, Peter Finch, David Gulpilil and Nicole Kidman crossed the psychic gangway between Sydney and Hollywood
Essays & reportage
The evolution of a myth
Bain Attwood
29 May 2023
How William Cooper became “the man who stood up to Hitler”
Essays & reportage
Boomer time
Robert Milliken
24 May 2023
Inside Story
editor Peter Browne introduces a memoir of Australia’s fifties by contributor Robert Milliken, who died last Sunday
Books & arts
And so on
Frank Yuan
22 May 2023
A necessarily incomplete guide to the prolific philosopher Slavoj Žižek
Books & arts
President Wilson on the couch
Nick Haslam
16 May 2023
What happened when a diplomat teamed up with Sigmund Freud to analyse the president?
Books & arts
Does anyone have a pencil?
Jamie Hanson
27 April 2023
Two men, five books, one film
Essays & reportage
Lifting the shadow
Anne-Marie Condé
29 March 2023
What constitutes “evidence” of a queer life?
Books & arts
Jane Austen’s prime minister?
Jane Goodall
14 March 2023
Tanya Plibersek’s biographer makes the case for her “strength of understanding and coolness of judgement”
Books & arts
Traces of Norman Mailer
Patrick Mullins
7 March 2023
Why did Richard Bradford bother writing his biography of the controversial American writer?
Books & arts
Taking it or leaving it
Richard Johnstone
15 February 2023
Can photographs unlock the past? Janet Malcolm isn’t so sure
Books & arts
Captains unpicked
Judith Brett
3 February 2023
What impact do biographies of living politicians have on their subjects?
From the archive
Arthur Stace’s single mighty word
Anne-Marie Condé
1 February 2023
Why did this shy Sydneysider dot his city with a one-word poem?
Books & arts
One-man intelligence network
Stephen Mills
1 February 2023
For a remarkable quarter-century, Tony Eggleton was the power behind the Liberal throne
Books & arts
With sojourns in Italy
Susan Lever
20 December 2022
How Shirley Hazzard resisted provincialism
Books & arts
A museum’s fall guy
Hamish McDonald
20 December 2022
Why was a successful scientist and gifted artist airbrushed out of history?
Newer posts
Older posts