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. In his introduction, Dr Holden explains why he has deliberately chosen to describe it as a “portrait” based on the subject’s own diaries (dating in one case from 1939 and a…