Non Fiction

Some things are easier to lose than others, but how does a piano come to be mislaid? When that piano has been lugged up and down an island mountain, made one – perhaps two – sea crossings, and been looted by the Nazis, there could be any number of causes for its disappearance ...

Born in 1825, Brisbane is an elderly lady who has been to a surprising number of ‘coming of age’ balls. Numerous historians, officials, speechmakers, and journalists for several decades have implied that Brisbane (as of 1982, 1988, or whenever) is now not only the belle of the ball, but she ...

The basic thesis of this book is that the gay movement has settled for accommodation rather than radical change, ignoring the ways in which larger social and economic inequalities impact on large numbers of homosexual and transsexual people, especially those who are not ...

For more than thirty years, Paul Collins has been His Holiness’s loyal opposition. Absolute Power is the latest round in his spirited debate with the Vatican, the government which has the largest constituency of any in the world. Collins’s interest, in fact obsession, is in the nature ...

The first season of Netflix’s drama The Crown sees the young Princess Elizabeth’s constitutional education taken in hand by Eton history master Henry Marten, whose schooling of the future monarch was largely historical rather than legal, a necessity given Britain’s ...

To what extent does the social practice of inheritance undermine social justice? Indeed, if inheritance does further inequality, should we, in order to ensure a fairer society, restrict the right to bequeath? A mainstay of political philosophy since the late seventeenth century, questions such as ...

During World War II, thousands of Indonesians arrived in Australia, brought by the colonial Dutch as they fled Japan’s military advance through Southeast Asia, and Molly Warner wanted to get to know them. She and other Australians established an association that sought ...

Necessary Evil: How to fix finance by saving human rights, by  David Kinley, a law professor at the University of Sydney, originates in the conclusion of his 2008 book looking at the social trade-offs of what he termed Civilising Globalisation. Kinley’s new book attempts to ...

One day not that far away, I suspect, hot-metal memoirs will grow cold on the slab. Thus the triumph of technology over the nostalgia of those days when journalistic skills included not only being up to shorthand speed but being able to read upside down and back to front. The latter skill ...