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history
Books & arts
Portraying the age
Geoff Wilkes
4 October 2022
Joseph Roth’s restless journeying produced an idiosyncratic depiction of central Europe in the twenties and thirties
Essays & reportage
The correspondent who saw too much
Melissa Roberts
3 October 2022
It was “harder to get into Fleet Street than to rob the bank of England,” wrote journalist Lorraine Summ. But she went on to publish one of the Pacific war’s great scoops
Books & arts
Scenes from a marriage
Nicholas Brown
3 October 2022
Two daughters profile a controversial father and an enigmatic mother against the backdrop of the growing bush capital
Essays & reportage
Memories, $2 each
Anne-Marie Condé
29 September 2022
A small wooden box yields glimpses of vanished lives
International
The long war of Soviet succession
Mark Edele
19 September 2022
The war in Ukraine is part of a long-simmering conflict across post-Soviet Europe and Asia
Essays & reportage
Was Fraser right?
Margaret Simons
12 September 2022
Malcolm Fraser promised no royal commission into the loans affair. Should other governments follow his lead?
Essays & reportage
Liberalism eclipsed
Mike Steketee
5 September 2022
Long forecast, the party’s grim prospects reflect an unpopular ideological narrowing
From the archive
Surely he wasn’t going in?
Patrick Mullins
4 September 2022
Harold Holt’s attraction to danger gives his death an air of inevitability
Books & arts
China syndromes
Kerry Brown
4 September 2022
Both Britain and Australia need to overcome a curious amnesia about their dealings with China
Books & arts
Thinking Black
Tim Rowse
11 January 2022
A new biography shows how William Cooper set out to civilise white Australia
Books & arts
Becoming refugees
Klaus Neumann
18 December 2021
The perceived threat posed by Europe’s postwar “Displaced Persons” helped shape today’s international refugee regime
Books & arts
Pulped!
Craig Munro
13 December 2021
Why book publishing can be a risky business
Essays & reportage
The citizen historian
Frank Bongiorno
1 December 2021
Stuart Macintyre, 1947–2021
From the archive
Noel Pearson, radical centrist
Tim Rowse
30 November 2021
During more than thirty years of public commentary the Aboriginal leader has charted his own course
Books & arts
Tall-poppy lopping
Patrick Mullins
30 November 2021
A historian from across the Tasman has applied a forensic eye to one of the history wars’ greatest battles
Books & arts
In the footsteps of the garibaldini
James Panichi
19 November 2021
Explaining Italy to the rest of us is Tim Parks’s specialty. Now he retraces a daring campaign conceived by the country’s best-known founder
Books & arts
Alternative histories
Marian Quartly
11 November 2021
Janet McCalman’s new book throws fresh light on Australia’s convict history
From the archive
Unquiet stories from Liffey
Anne-Marie Condé
11 November 2021
A graveyard hints at the many people already mourning when the first world war broke out
From the archive
On being cosmopolitan
Sara Dowse
22 October 2021
In search of his forebears, a writer finds an era of “constructive cosmopolitan complexity”
Books & arts
What the Romans have done for us
Stephen Mills
22 October 2021
Celebrity classicist Mary Beard turns sleuth in an entertaining account of the long afterlife of twelve emperors
Books & arts
Feeding the machine
Susan Lever
11 October 2021
In what ways did the typewriter affect how — and how much — writers wrote?
Books & arts
Churchill on — and sometimes behind — the screen
Brian McFarlane
8 October 2021
Lockdown has been a chance to compare on-screen treatments of the former British PM, and a documentary about his friendship with director Alexander Korda
Books & arts
A mother’s son
Sylvia Martin
7 October 2021
An unconventional biography reveals a complex cold war–era family
Essays & reportage
In no-man’s land
Klaus Neumann
1 October 2021
The predicament of refugees at the Polish–Belarusian border evokes deportations to Poland in 1938 and a novel published in 1940
From the archive
Home is where the mind is
Robin Jeffrey
27 September 2021
How two sons of empire became leading public intellectuals
Essays & reportage
The dealmaker
Frank Bongiorno
24 September 2021
John Elliott — who died this week — in many ways personified the business excesses of Australia’s 1980s
From the archive
Troubled minds
Alecia Simmonds
17 September 2021
Are mistaken beliefs about the history of mental health treatments stopping us from creating a humane system?
Books & arts
Death in Shanghai
Linda Jaivin
16 September 2021
How Xu Shangzhen’s suicide gripped a city
Essays & reportage
Why the New Deal still matters
Eric Rauchway
13 September 2021
In ways that still resonate, the program to drag the economy out of the Great Depression changed Americans’ relationships with politics, economics and each other
Essays & reportage
Telling truths
Tim Rowse
10 September 2021
What will emerge from an Indigenous-led process of truth-telling?
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