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Non Fiction

A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand edited by Graham Oppy et al. (eds)

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December 2010–January 2011, no. 327

Early in Murray Bail’s novel The Pages (2008), we find the following commentary on the very idea of philosophical research being undertaken in Australia:

How anyone can believe that Sydney could produce in its own backyard a philosopher of world significance or even minor significance shows how little understanding there is of the co ...

Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy by Lindsay Tanner

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June 2011, no. 332

Bill Clinton discouraged politicians from picking fights with people who bought their ink by the barrel. Mindful of that advice, Lindsay Tanner has waited until the end of a career dedicated to the ‘serious craft of politics’ to remonstrate with the fourth estate about its fundamental unseriousness in reporting the democratic process ...

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A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor

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June 2011, no. 332

This fascinating, complex book relies for its success on the simplest of ideas and methodologies. Its publication was the necessary and inevitable follow-on from the hugely successful BBC Radio 4 series, when, over twenty weeks, British Museum (BM) director Neil MacGregor presented short, daily radio commentaries ...

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The Decline and Fall of the American Republic by Bruce Ackerman

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June 2011, no. 332

As people around the world watch events in the United States, many will agree that it is indeed an exceptional, if conflicted, nation. The sole superpower, with the world’s largest economy and the most powerful military ever known, is hugely in debt, and struggles agonisingly just to produce a federal budget ...

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All Day Long the Noise of Battle: An Australian Attack in Vietnam by Gerard Windsor

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June 2011, no. 332

The title of this new book on the Vietnam War comes from the final verse cycle of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1869). As Arthur lies dying, he reflects ‘that we / Shall never more ... Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds’. This Arthurian borrowing for the title of a book about an obscure battle fought by Australians in Vietnam during the 19 ...

Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making Their Mark by Susan Sheridan

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February 2011, no. 328

Susan Sheridan’s Nine Lives, a ‘group biography’, analyses the life stories and literary achievements of nine Australian women writers. The purpose, according to Sheridan, is not only to rediscover the life story of each, but also, by exploring their publishing and aesthetic context, to create a ‘fresh configuration’ of our literary history.

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Shakespeare, Sex, and Love by Stanley Wells & Shakespeare’s Freedom by Stephen Greenblatt

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February 2011, no. 328

One of Angelina Jolie’s first starring roles was as Shakespeare’s Juliet in Love Is All There Is (1996). Or rather, she plays Gina Malacici, a Bronx schoolgirl fiercely protected from life by her wealthy, restaurant-owning Italian parents, recruited to play Juliet in the school play when the leading actress injures herself falling off the balcony. Faced ...

Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars From Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

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February 2011, no. 328

When members of the rock band Men at Work recorded their legendary hit ‘Down Under’ in the early 1980s, they wanted to inject a stronger sense of Australianness into the song, so they included a flute riff of a few bars echoing the classic Australian children’s chorus ‘Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree’, just as one might, in a different geographical con ...

Face: Australian Portraits 1880–1960 by Anne Gray & The Naked Face: Self-portraits by Vivien Gaston

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February 2011, no. 328

Roy Porter wrote that ‘the portrait (above all the self-portrait), the diary and the biography (especially the autobiography) – reveal heightened perceptions of individuality, the proud ego vaunting and flaunting his own being’. This may be so, but self-portraiture is a genre that crosses many secret thresholds ...

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Savage or Civilised? Manners in Colonial Australia by Penny Russell

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February 2011, no. 328

Lacking a titled aristocracy and the leisured class that went with it, Australian colonial society encouraged an egalitarianism of manners. This, however, did not reflect the absence of social stratification: rather, as it has been argued, it was a means of being reconciled to it in a new setting ...

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