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Paul Giles

Love and Lament: An essay on the arts in Australia in the twentieth century by Margaret Plant

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June-July 2018, no. 402
Paul Giles reviews 'Love and Lament: An essay on the arts in Australia in the twentieth century' by Margaret Plant

Love and Lament offers a bracingly revisionist and upbeat account of how the arts flourished across a broad cultural spectrum in Australia over the course of the twentieth century. Margaret Plant, an emeritus professor of the visual arts at Monash University, argues explicitly with the thesis propounded by Keith ...

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No End of a Lesson: Australia’s unified national system of higher education by Stuart Macintyre, André Brett, and Gwilym Croucher

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January–February 2018, no. 398
Paul Giles reviews 'No End of a Lesson: Australia’s unified national system of higher education' by Stuart Macintyre, André Brett, and Gwilym Croucher

Ever since Henry VIII plundered the monasteries, relations between those in seats of power and learning have tended to be fraught, since political administrators do not take kindly to scholars thinking they know best how to run their own affairs, and vice versa ...

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2017 Books of the Year

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December 2017, no. 397

To celebrate the best books of 2017 Australian Book Review invited nearly forty contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors include Michelle de Kretser, Susan Wyndham, James Ley, Geordie Williamson, Jane Sullivan, Tom Griffiths, Mark Edele, and Brenda Niall.

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A Long Way from Home by Peter Carey

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November 2017, no. 396
Paul Giles reviews 'A Long Way from Home' by Peter Carey

On learning that the premise of Peter Carey’s new novel involved a test of automobile reliability on a round trip across Australia, my first response was to dismiss it as a thin conceit for encompassing the country’s remoter landscape within a work of the imagination. The internet, however, quickly delivered old Pathé newsreels ...

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The Glamour of Strangeness: Artists and the lost age of the exotics by Jamie James

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May 2017, no. 391
Paul Giles reviews 'The Glamour of Strangeness: Artists and the lost age of the exotics' by Jamie James

Described in one of the blurbs on its back cover as ‘a cabinet of wonders for lovers of faraway countries,’ Jamie James’s The Glamour of Strangeness is unusual in terms of the wide variety of the material it covers. James focuses here on artists who left their homelands ‘to create a new self in a new place’, arguing that the ‘exotic’ aesthetic ...

The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 9: The world novel in English to 1950 edited by Ralph Crane, Jane Stafford, and Mark Williams

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April 2017, no. 390
Paul Giles reviews 'The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 9: The world novel in English to 1950' edited by Ralph Crane, Jane Stafford, and Mark Williams

The latest instalment in the Oxford History of the Novel in English is notable for having one of its editors based in Australia and the other two in New Zealand. As these editors admit in their introduction, this volume is ‘something of a hybrid when set alongside the other eleven volumes that make up the series’, since it is organised partly by historical date, ...

Books of the Year 2016

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December 2016, no. 387

Originally published in German, Albrecht Dümling’s The Vanished Musicians: Jewish refugees in Australia (Peter Lang), a fascinating compendium of Jewish musicians who found refuge in Australia in the 1930s and 1940s, is now available in Australian Diana K. Weekes’s excellent translation ...

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D.H. Lawrence's Australia: Anxiety at the edge of empire by David Game

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June–July 2016, no. 382
Paul Giles reviews 'D.H. Lawrence's Australia: Anxiety at the edge of empire' by David Game

When D.H. Lawrence arrived in Australia on 4 May 1922, he was so ignorant of the country's actual conditions that he was, as David Game observes ...

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The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander Von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science by Andrea Wulf

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March 2016, no. 379
Paul Giles reviews 'The Invention of Nature' by Andrea Wulf

Alexander von Humboldt, who died in 1859 at the age of eighty-nine, was not only the most famous scientist of his day but also one of the world's best-known figures. He met often with political leaders, from Thomas Jefferson in the new United States to King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, and he expanded outwards from his bases in Paris and Berlin to pursue variou ...

The Work of Literature by Derek Attridge

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January-February 2016, no. 378
Paul Giles reviews 'The Work of Literature' by Derek Attridge

Derek Attridge is one of the most formidable theorists working today in the field of literary studies. His central strategy is to identify potential for recognition in the reading process of singularity and alterity, with the qualities of a particular work manifesting themselves most powerfully when they reveal 'unexpected possibilities of thought and feeling'.

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