November 2006

Lionel Rose & Elvis Presley

By Shane Maloney

Lionel Rose was nearing the end of a hard training session when he got the message that Elvis Presley wanted to meet him. It was December 1968 and the 20-year-old Aboriginal boxer had come to Los Angeles to defend his world bantamweight title against Mexican challenger Chucho Castillo. But the bout was still two days away, and an invitation from the King was not something to be passed up. Elv

‘North Face of Soho: Unreliable Memoirs Volume IV’ By Clive James

By Chris Middendorp

Ann Turner’s 'Irresistible'

Resistible

By Adrian Martin

One of the things that immediately gives away mediocre Australian films is their ill-chosen titles. Irresistible: a snappy, intriguing hook in the vein of Derailed or Malicious. But not far into the movie, you cannot help wondering who or what is meant to be irresistible in this story. Is it the foxy young Mara (Emily Blunt), the new assistant to Craig (Sam Neill) who appears to have a strange obsession with his wife, Sophie (Susan Sara

Lloyd Jones’s 'Mister Pip'

Letters in the Sand

By Drusilla Modjeska

Walter Crocker’s ‘Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate’

An Uncommon Diplomacy

By Ramachandra Guha

'The Countdown Spectacular'

Heroes (Just for One Day)

By Robert Forster

The battle of ideas in Australian politics

Howard’s Brutopia

By Kevin Rudd

An interview with Robert Hughes

Time’s Arrow

By Peter Craven

Hughes had become the art critic of Time magazine in 1970, and you could read those page-long pieces - which as severe a judge as Gerald Murnane once described as being written in flawless prose - 30 or so times a year. There were also, over the decades, those

Why we're still more English than American

British Rules

By Gideon Haigh

Palm Island after the inquest into an death in custody

Who Let the Dogs Out?

By Chloe Hooper

For the Record

By Malcolm Knox

‘The Library of Babel', a 1941 story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, is often read as a prefigurement of the internet. Every book in the library has 410 pages, made up of the letters of the standard alphabet. The catch is that these letters are ar

Park Life

By Sarah Kanowski

"You're handsome! You're beautiful!" he calls out as he walks the dogs. "Jesus loves you!" was the preferred greeting for a week or two, but it's the good looks of his fellow citizens that's his favoured theme. The dog-walker dresses in a blue boilersuit in winter and b

Walk the Line

By Mungo MacCallum

King over all the children of prideIs the Press - the Press - the Press!Rudyard KiplingMark Latham's latest work, A Conga Line of Suckholes, takes its tasteful title from one of the author's own more memorable epithets. Boof was referring to Liberal ministers queuing to service the American president, but the line could equally be applied to any section of t