A recent visit to Melbourne to hear an important oration […]

Shimon Cowen, Politics and Universal Ethics (Connor Court, 2011), 120 […]

This year is an appropriate one to recall the work […]

 James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific, Thames & […]

We have seen some of these images before, but usually […]

The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War, by David Lebedoff;  Scribe, 2008, 264 pages, $29.95.

This intriguing and insightful book has captured much attention and appreciation from readers internationally. Its author is a practising lawyer in Minnesota, who graduated from the Harvard Law School and whose other books include one on the Exxon-Valdez oil spillage litigation. Lebedoff’s present work is a parallel study of aspects of the lives and work of two leading English writers, the atheist George Orwell and the Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh, who at first might seem poles apart in nature, background and outlook—but who prove, on closer analysis, to have shared a deep regard for objective truths and an almost visceral dislike of all “political correctness”. The author’s prologue sets the scene by contrasting a ducal dinner party attended by Waugh in June 1930 “at the height of a brilliant London season”, whilst Eric Blair (later known as George Orwell) was “working alone in a small, shabby room in the working-class section of Leeds” writing Down and Out in Paris and London.

William Frater first arrived in Australia in 1910. At his […]

A Recent visit to Kiama and Gerringong, in the Illawarra […]

The Outsider: A Portrait of Ursula Hoff, by Colin Holden; Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009, $49.95.

This detailed and thoughtful biography of Dr Ursula Hoff AO OBE (1909–2005) appears in her centenary year. It is based largely on research by the author, a professional historian, into the surviving diaries kept by Dr Hoff, now in private hands, and other sources including Hoff papers deposited in the University of Melbourne Archives.