Books

Current Issue Sugar and spies

The Profumo Affair, 50 years on

By Frank Bongiorno

At Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, Arkansas Senator Dale Bumpers gave an eloquent summation of why a semen-stained dress and the manifold uses of a cigar had become of such absorbing interest: “HL Mencken said one time, ‘When you hear somebody say, “This is not about money” – it’s about money. And when you hear somebody say, “This is not about

Current Issue Anna Krien’s ‘Night Games’

Behind Play

By James Button

It’s a courtroom drama that begins where most end, with the verdict. Justin Dyer is the defendant on six charges of the rape, attempted rape and indecent assault of Sarah Wesley. The jury files into court. The foreman stands to speak, the document in his hand shaking. Not guilty, he declares of the first charge. “Justin buckles and lets out a huge wracking sob,” Anna Krie

The devil’s instrument

The violin through time

By Sheila Fitzpatrick

Benito Mussolini, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin and Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam had at least one thing in common: they were all passionate amateur violinists. Farrakhan, perhaps the most ambitious, returned to his childhood avocation at the age of 60 and not only performed Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in public but persuaded the New York Times to review it. As for Einstein, goes the joke, he was a fine quartet playe

The slash pile

The cheap thrills of fan fiction

By Linda Jaivin

Ever imagined Paul Keating and Germaine Greer getting it on to the rhythm of Keating’s Redfern speech? Jennifer Byrne has. Brendan Cowell has done it with a bhang lassi–infused Aussie cricket team. Noni Hazlehurst, Toby Schmitz and I have done it too – written erotic fan fiction, that is. It’s all been at the instigation of Eddie Shar

The clown v. the critic

The competing sides of Clive James

By Geordie Williamson

There is a phenomenon that astronomers call “gravitational lensing”. When the light from distant, brilliant stars passes an object of sufficient mass, it performs a Beckham-like bend on its way to Earth and the human eye. Gravity curves the rays, m

JM Coetzee’s ‘The Childhood of Jesus’

To Hell with Self-help

By Craig Sherborne

It’s tempting to imagine Jesus as an annoying child, a know-it-all, uncomplicatedly divine. In JM Coetzee’s latest novel, The Childhood of Jesus (Text Publishing; $34.99), it’s not clear if Jesus is truly present as a character or not. There

‘Madigan’s Account: The Mawson Expedition’

From Cecil, with Loathing

By David Day

The stirring tale of Douglas Mawson’s epic trek across the Antarctic’s crevasse-ridden ice has been told to generations of Australians. Although it was Mawson who gave the story its authenticity, it was Archie McLean, the expedition’s doctor and an amateur writer,

‘The Words That Made Australia’

Hard truths

By James Button

Scorn for the suburbs, gentle or fierce, is a staple of Australian cultural life. From My Brother Jack to Edna Everage and Sandy Stone, to Muriel’s Wedding and Kath and Kim, writers and artists have painted suburbia as a human desert. It’s seen as the plac

The lessons and literature of Black Saturday

Next Time

By Robyn Annear

After years of drought and a record heatwave, bushfires in Victoria on 7 February 2009 killed 173 people and destroyed more than 2000 homes. The fires were fiercest and their force most felt in the ranges north-east of Melbourne. These bushfires were a once-in-a-lifetim

JC Kannemeyer’s ‘JM Coetzee: A Life in Writing’

On His Terms

By Alexandra Coghlan

How many biographies of Nobel Prize winners have to start by clarifying the name of their subject? Such is the mystery of South African author JM Coetzee that even his full name – John Maxwell Coetzee – has been in doubt, one factor among many feeding the

Mining literature

What the Boom Won’t Leave Behind

By Malcolm Knox

Some of Australia’s best-known mining stories are about non-miners. Lewis Lasseter’s quest for the mighty reef of gold he saw, and lost, in Central Australia is a white man’s dreaming. Lasseter’s only rival as a subject for mining books is Lang Hancock

Maxine McKew’s ‘Tales from the Political Trenches’ and James Button’s ‘Speechless: A Year In My Father’s Business’

After the game

By Amanda Lohrey

In these two absorbing political memoirs one finds a common theme, that of the professional observer who decides to turn activist. It must occur to any journalist who covers the Canberra dogfight to ask: how would I perform in the spotlight? Could I withstand the pressu

Visiting Orhan Pamuk’s 'Museum of Innocence'

The novel lives

By Alexandra Coghlan

Stretching the three kilometres from the city’s funicular railway station to Taksim Square in party-central Beyolğu, İstiklal Avenue is Istanbul’s most famous street. It thrums with shoppers, tourists, processions and protest marches, the metallic clatter of the city insistent, unremitting. Left and right along its length run cobbled alleyways, their s

Murray Bail's 'The Voyage'

Bringing it Home

By John Banville

The dilemma facing the writer of fiction is how to fix on a mode of language by which to represent the world of commonplace experience. This may seem obvious; however, problems attach to the task that are not readily resolvable – words are angular but the world is round, and squaring that circle is tormentingly difficult, if not impossible. Every tyro is familiar with the sickening sense of dizz

Benjamin Law’s 'Gaysia'

Queer and Loathing

By Robert Dessaix

Benjamin Law has invented a new style of journalism: ‘gonzo nice’. Like straight gonzo, the kind popularised by the hard-drinking, drug-addled Hunter S Thompson in Rolling Stone some 40 years ago, it is opinionated, in on the action, racy, unfazed by sexua

Hugh White’s 'The China Choice'

Power Shift

By Malcolm Turnbull

Hugh White has helped shape strategic thinking in Canberra and Washington by confronting the world as it is, not as we would like it to be, and outlining the choices that need to be made, even if we don’t agree with his conclusions. The thesis of White’s t

Winning Enemies

By John Birmingham

The humiliating retreat from the southern Iraqi city of Basra, into cantonment at the airport, is widely regarded as the modern nadir of the British military. On 2 September 2007, a bugle sounded ‘Advance’ to signal the withdrawal, and a convoy carrying the last few

Memory Palaces

By Luke Davies

The recent, beautiful graphic novel Mister Wonderful, by the American cartoonist Daniel Clowes, tells the story of Marshall, a man who frets – greatly, incessantly, neurotically – both in the lead-up to and all the way through his first blind date in years. The hilarious intensity of the interior monologue, the exhausting self-analysis of Marshall’s anxiety, holds us rapt. How could anyone b