Sorted on book title (not in series order)
In the pages that follow, I have collected some of my favourite exchanges which can fairly be described as acid drops. The cruel bon mot which has its sting drawn from the laughter that ensues. It was Oscar Wilde who pointed out that no comment was in bad taste if it was amusing - and if...Read more
Angela Merkel has always been an outsider. A pastor’s daughter raised in Soviet-controlled East Germany, she spent her twenties working as a research chemist, entering politics only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And yet within fifteen years, she had become chancellor of Germany and,...Read more
Portrays the life of Dorothy L. Sayers and examines the development of her career as an author of detective stories and Christian theologyRead more
The first joint biography of the Duke and Duchess of York and the first full biography of either of them, by renowned royal biographer and literary agent, Andrew Lownie.
Drawing on four years of research, numerous FOI requests and interviews with over a hundred...Read more
Dorothy Porter was one of Australia' s most charismatic and courageous literary figures. Achieving broader fame through her bestselling queer crime verse novel, The Monkey' s Mask, and its film adaptation, she took poetry and performance to new heights. Her younger sister, Josie McSkimming...Read more
The exploits of Lola Montez - onstage as a dancer and an actress, in politics as a power behind thrones, and in bedrooms around the world - made her one of the best-known women of the Victorian era. Born Eliza Gilbert, daughter of British and Irish parents, she transformed herself into an...Read more
The Lost Mother, published by Melbourne University Press, is a gripping narrative that is part art history, part detective story and part meditation on the relations between mothers and daughters.
It recounts how after Anne inherited a portrait of her mother as a child, she...Read more
'I am sometimes identified as one of the "success stories" of the policies of removal of Aboriginal children. But for much of my childhood I was deeply unhappy. I feel I had been deprived of love and the ability to love in return. Like Lily, my mother, I felt totally powerless. And I think...Read more
Julia Gillard is an exceptional Australian political figure. The first woman to be deputy prime minister - and tipped by many to get the top job in the future - she is admired on both sides of politics as well as by the public.Read more
Ellen Kelly was born during the troubles in Ireland. When she arrived in Melbourne in 1841 aged nine, British convict ships were still dumping their unhappy cargo in what was then known as the colony of New South Wales. When she died at the age of 91 in 1923, having outlived seven of her 12...Read more
Through family interviews, diaries, letters, and workbooks that had been sealed for over sixty years, Barbara Goldsmith reveals the Marie Curie behind the myth—an all-too-human woman struggling to balance a spectacular scientific career, a demanding family, the prejudice of society, and her...Read more
Philby, the agent, double agent, traitor, enigma revealed all to Knightley just before his death. Few knew the real man behind the impenetrable facade that for years fooled British Intelligence, the CIA and the FBI. After he defected to Russia in 1963, he maintained a code of silence for 25...Read more
Shadow Lines is the story of Jessie Argyle, born in the remote East Kimberley and taken from her Aboriginal family at the age of five, and Edward Smith, a young Englishman escaping the rigid structures of London who fell in love and married. Despite unrelenting surveillance and harassment,...Read more
Aged six, Robert Drewe moved with his family from Melbourne to Perth, the world's most isolated city - and proud of it. This sun-baked coast was innocently proud, too, of its tranquillity and friendliness. Then a man he knew murdered a boy he also knew. The murderer randomly killed eight...Read more
Sheila wedded earls and barons, befriended literary figures and movie stars, bedded a future king, was feted by London and New York society for forty years and when she died was a Russian princess.
Vivacious, confident and striking, Sheila Chisholm met her first husband, Francis...Read more
'People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.'
At the time of his death in 2015, award-winning and bestselling author Sir Terry Pratchett was working on his finest story yet - his own.
At six years old, Terry was told by his...Read more