In compiling an anthology of Gippsland poetry, I came across a number of impressive poems by a William Sharp. All I knew about him at the time was that he was a late-nineteenth-century London literary figure who had visited Victoria. As it turned out, there was much more to learn of this leading figure in the Celtic Twilight movement

Milan Kundera believed that overcoming totalitarianism was a battle of memory over forgetting. As one of those who had come back from the land of the dead, such sentiments also were in the forefront of Solzhenitsyn’s mind. Like others, he felt under an enormous obligation to speak on behalf of all those fellow inmates who perished

Why invade Ukraine? For Putin, a contented country modestly wishing to be neither East nor West invited damning comparisons with his own Russia and that could not be tolerated. Likewise, those in the West who might otherwise have rationalised his aggression could not countenance his threat of nuclear escalation. For the Left it was one outrage too many

The best books exist beyond the bubble of presentism, which recycles historical events through the stereotyped ideological prism of today. Real books are in sympathy with the past. They don’t bewail how past generations failed to live up to our lofty moral standards, the subtext of so many contemporary invectives

In 'Marcus Clarke: Novelist, Journalist and Bohemian', Michael Wilding unearths an amazing array of known and previously obscure sources to build up, layer by layer, the characters at the heart of Melbourne’s early bohemia

A great woke irony! Philip Roth’s unknown biographer is now […]

The Australian expat's saturation in Italy’s culture and its religious past is evident everywhere in his new novel, 'The Diviner Comedy', whose success in melding disparate material into a fascinating whole is owed to decades of developing that most valuable of literary skills, paring away the inessential

Famous novelist, notorious womanizer and political activist, Roth's 'American Trilogy' charts his own evolution, aligning right-wing McCarthyism with later left-wing political correctness, each dominated by ‘the malevolent puritanism' of ‘America’s oldest communal passion … the ecstasy of sanctimony'

This book contains some mysteries. How does a person starting […]