December 2009 Volume LIII, No. 12
How True Was Freud?
The Travails of the New South Africa
What’s Wrong with Australian Fiction?
Hanging On to the Bitter End
On Liberty
The Return of Ayn Rand
Contents
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A character in A.S. Byatt’s 1990 Booker Prize novel Possession […]
December 1, 2009
23 mins
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The air was thick with hope and dread as April […]
December 1, 2009
20 mins
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Once in a while, a literary prize gets awarded to […]
December 1, 2009
39 mins
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So it’s a dark, stormy night and this cruiser capsizes, […]
December 1, 2009
21 mins
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This year is the 150th anniversary of the publication of […]
December 1, 2009
33 mins
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Ayn Rand is best known for her novels The Fountainhead […]
December 1, 2009
14 mins
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“Buffalo were feeding ravenously. Beaver were damming and storing with […]
December 1, 2009
17 mins
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Neither Western Australia nor Tasmania has received German immigration to […]
December 1, 2009
19 mins
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One of the more unpleasant tussles of historical writing, the […]
December 1, 2009
22 mins
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The bullingly brilliant Kenneth Tynan published his first book of […]
December 1, 2009
11 mins
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Since the election of the Rudd government, immigration and citizenship […]
December 1, 2009
45 mins
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I started on the Left. My dad was a motor mechanic […]
December 1, 2009
18 mins
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The row of camphor laurels by the post office has […]
December 1, 2009
6 mins
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What rite gives him the right to write about his […]
December 1, 2009
1 mins
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Is that the baobab which shaded him thirty-five years ago […]
December 1, 2009
1 mins
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Yesterday I was at the Mall and I heard my […]
December 1, 2009
1 mins
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Muriel Spark: The Biography, by Martin Stannard; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009, $66.95.
For those who believe a great author should be remembered more for her work than her life, any biography will fall short, since it isn’t literary criticism. Biography serves a different purpose and has different readers. While some readers do want a biography to shed more light on her work, some are obsessed with a psychological dissection of her life, some crave gossip and other forms of debunking, and some are simply celebrity voyeurs. Given such tabloid tendencies—of looking for the bad and wanting to know whether the great author was an ungrateful daughter, a difficult sister, a poor wife, an uncaring mother, a petulant celebrity, an intellectual snob, a disloyal friend, and finally, when all the men in her life failed her, whether she became a lesbian—it must be hard for the serious biographer to strike the right balance between two extremes: being a Frank Kermode at one end; being a Kitty Kelley at the other. Martin Stannard is in a unique position to achieve a perfect balance, since he’s a professor of modern literature, but there’s a story behind this long-awaited biography of Muriel Spark, one of the twentieth century’s most gifted and original authors.
December 1, 2009
11 mins
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It is now more than thirteen years since I established […]
December 1, 2009
25 mins
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In the holdings of the National Gallery of Australia is […]
December 1, 2009
9 mins
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A Recent visit to Kiama and Gerringong, in the Illawarra […]
December 1, 2009
20 mins
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On a Friday lunch hour in 1964, hungry and thirsty […]
December 1, 2009
13 mins
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About three weeks ago my passport was stolen. I would […]
December 1, 2009
7 mins
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Public debate about “bullying” flared recently in the wake of […]
December 1, 2009
24 mins
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William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies, by John Carey; Faber & Faber, 2009, $49.99.
John Carey’s William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies discusses the novelist and his work. The subtitle, Carey admits, is ironic. Golding was much more than the author of his first published (and most celebrated) novel. As a biographer, Carey has been blessed. He has secured access to and presented to the public such a mass of material that his biography will be a valuable resource for any future attempts to discuss Golding’s life and works.
First, Golding’s father, a bookish, atheist and socialist school teacher, kept a journal, which Carey uses to provide insights into the man who had the most significant influence on Golding the writer.
December 1, 2009
9 mins
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Elements of Agriculture SIR: I appreciated the comments of Mark […]
December 1, 2009
12 mins
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The Children of Hurin, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien, HarperCollins, 2009, $18.95.
Lovers of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, may return to that realm with The Children of Hurin, published posthumously and with some fairly light-handed editing and explanation by his son.
Some who have dipped into The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s uncompleted and posthumously-published account of the Elder Days, have been put off by its high, epic style, without the alleviating homeliness to be found in The Lord of the Rings, or the frequent humour of The Hobbit, as well as by the fact that it is a set of long fragments, not quite seamlessly joined. In the complex, interwoven tales it is also sometimes difficult to tell who is who.
December 1, 2009
3 mins
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Withdrawal symptoms! That’s what I’m suffering, and from a cause […]
December 1, 2009
8 mins
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In this season we celebrate the birth of helpless children. […]
December 1, 2009
2 mins
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after Picasso He’s taken possession of the hat Van Gogh […]
December 1, 2009
2 mins
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Sexual intercourse came to an end in the twentieth century, […]
December 1, 2009
1 mins
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That summer made the suburbs seem a war zone. Smoke […]
December 1, 2009
2 mins
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(Grieg’s Composition Hut at Troldhaugen) Fairytale: the fierce slope […]
December 1, 2009
2 mins