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Millionplus Australian real estate for saleIn 1935 to be Catholic was to be Irish, and the hierarchy ruled its flock with a firm doctrinal hand and an unchallenged tribal authority - no one more so than Daniel Mannix, the venerable Cork-born archbishop of Melbourne. Tall, gaunt and magisterial, Mannix was already ancient. Born in 1864, he had become a contentious ecclesiastical figure in the Irish nationalist movement. Shipped to Australia, his stand against conscription led to demands for his deportation. In 1920, the Royal Navy prevented him landing in his insurgent homeland and he returned to Australia,...
Peter Craven
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'The Legacy' by Kirsten Tranter
Peter Craven | Books | February 2010 | Society & Culture | NotedKirsten Tranter, the daughter of famous poet John and formidable literary agent Lyn, has a literary background with bells on. Her first novel, The Legacy, shows her to be a novelist with a commanding talent – a tough plain-stylist who can people her fictional world with characters of great vivacity... -
Tudor Style: Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’
Peter Craven | July 2009 | Arts & Letters | Books | Society & CultureIt must be an abyss to contemplate the historical novel set in Tudor times. It’s not so much that the job has been done with such splendour in days gone by: Ford Madox Ford’s The Fifth Queen, about Catherine Howard, or Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun, about Shakespeare, are... -
Peter Craven's Best Books for Summer 2008-09
Peter Craven | Dec 2008 - Jan 2009 | Books | Lists | Online OnlyAlice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Bloomsbury, 976pp; $49.95). Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father, read by the author (Text Publishing, 6 CDs; $39.95).Helen Garner, The Spare Room (Text Publishing, 208pp; $29.95).Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap (Allen & Unwin,... -
A Stockingful: Peter Craven on the Best Books for Summer
Peter Craven | Dec 2008 - Jan 2009 | BooksI suppose 2008 will be remembered as the year when the bottom fell out of the markets and America elected Barack Obama. If the former is likely to send most readers screaming back to John Maynard Keynes (or perhaps to the remarkably detailed and candid The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business... -
Sing Out Loud, Sing Out Strong: Opera in Australia
Peter Craven | June 2008 | OperaIt's an odd business, a night at the opera. You know, if you like the diversion, that you are basking in the glow of an artistic institution that we're lucky to have and yet sometimes the effect can be bemusing and the ho-hums can assail you, as if the maintenance of an expensive art form... -
Sixty of the Best: The best books for summer
Peter Craven | Books | Dec 2007 - Jan 2008Christmas is one of those times when the world gives books, almost as if a nostalgia for filling the mind with images suggested by words has as deep a pull on our unconscious mind as the birth in the manger of that Jewish preacher who said we should love the next person the way we love ourselves.... -
Peter Craven's Best Books for Summer 2007-08
Peter Craven | Books | Dec 2007 - Jan 2008 | Lists | Online OnlyJulian Burnside, Watching Brief: Reflections on Human Rights, Law and Justice (Scribe, 320pp; $32.95). ISBN(13): 9781921215490.Julia Fox, Jane Boleyn: The Infamous Lady Rochford (W&N, 400pp; $55). ISBN: 0297850814.Waleed Aly, People Like Us: How Arrogance is Dividing Islam and the West (Picador... -
As You Like It: An interview with Geoffrey Rush
Peter Craven | The Monthly Essays | Theatre | April 2007 | Society & CultureGeoffrey Rush's last appearance on an Australian stage was in 2002, with Life x 3, in which he and his wife, Jane Menelaus, transfigured the production and made it dance through a great whirligig of typologies. Well, he is back on stage again with a new production, by his friend Neil Armfield,... -
A Thinking Read: The Best Books for Summer
Peter Craven | Books | Dec 2006 - Jan 2007It's always an odd business to work out the vagaries of what anyone might like to read over Christmas and the New Year. Even the gender lines get tricky: not all fiction is simply a woman's domain, and in the area of non-fiction, Antonia Fraser, the woman who can make any stretch of history... -
Time’s Arrow: An interview with Robert Hughes
Peter Craven | The Monthly Essays | November 2006Hughes 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 TV surveys of art, The Shock of the... -
Cut!: Has the Australian film industry lost its way?
Peter Craven | The Monthly Essays | May 2006When Mel Gibson, the man who had acted in Waiting for Godot with Rush many years before, handed him the Academy Award, he said, “I always knew you had it in you.” There was the perception not so long ago that when it came to film and television – which, after all, form the permanent record of a... -
Truth, Lies, Madness: MJ Hyland’s 'Carry Me Down'
Peter Craven | Books | April 2006Maria Hyland came to prominence a couple of years ago with How the Light Gets In, the mesmerising story of a Bad Girl who is always proving herself more right than her betters. And if there’s any kind of Achilles heel in this bright and blistering talent it is along the lines of the fact that the...
