Evans has, through painstaking research in Ireland and New Zealand, revealed — in the words of the historian Geoffrey Bolton — O’Connor’s ‘elusive and complex personality’ and enriched our understanding of this outstanding ...

At one point in "The Autonomy of Literature", Richard Lansdown remarks that he hopes his does not belong to the ‘poisonous’ genre of anti-theory books. He doesn’t justify this striking epithet, but the remark at least ...

Although he attributes it to Walter McVitty’s "Innocence and Experience" (1981) and Brenda Niall’s "Australia through the Looking Glass" (1984), there is no doubt that Maurice Saxby’s pioneering "A History of Australian ...

Richard Bosworth, in this superb biography of Italy’s Duce, is critical of ‘the great man in history’ and intentionalist approaches that vest all power, initiative and control in leaders, particularly in the case of ...

For a long time in her column in 'The Australian', Rosemary Neill has been breaking the taboo that Aboriginal affairs must not be discussed honestly. She has now brought her researches and thoughts together in a book. The ...

John Button’s prognostications on the state of the Labor Party have already attracted substantial discussion. Coming little more than six months after Labor lost the federal election — and also lost a good deal of self-respect ...

John Toohey’s "Quiros" is set during the seventeenth-century search for the Great South Land. Toohey negotiates the pitfalls of his genre with mixed success. The situation he explores is intriguing: men grouped in a confined ...

This item discusses connections between the Australian Book Review and AustLit, the Australian Literature Gateway (www.austlit.edu.au).

The tension between strict Darwinism and transformist evolutionary schemes not founded on natural selection is central to "Disseminating Darwinism". The best chapters (those by Eric Anderson, Scott Appleby, David Livingstone ...