Biography

It’s no easy task to render a sprawling archive into a narrative that captures the significance of Paula Modersohn-Becker for a readership a century later – a figure not only of her time but also for ours. A trace, she calls it, and yes, it is her trace and with it she achieves – more than existing studies have – the aim Hermione Lee posits for all forms of biographical and life-writing: ‘a living person in a body, not a smoothed-over figure’.

Fink is as scrupulous, in her way, as her subject was. By which I mean she is able, most of the time, to avoid comment. She doesn’t editorialise. The significance of events in Oliver’s life is allowed to emerge from contemporary testimony, perhaps, or from narrative juxtaposition, or simply because of the baleful grandeur of Oliver’s commitment to her work and the sometimes alarming consequences of her dedication.

Kraus’s oeuvre has been dedicated to the writing of unlikeable women; challenging congeniality as the bedrock of femininity and exploring the uncomfortable and often humorous situations generated by ambitious, creative women when they cast off congeniality and conventional sexuality. That Acker was a difficult, competitive and transient friend, peer, collaborator and lover makes her an ideal subject for Kraus to continue her work of intervening in conversations about women writers, what the avant-garde is and where it is located.

I also had the sensation of ‘growing up’ as a result of reading Brennan’s book. This statement expects no flabbergasted reaction. Many of us know that books have tracked our lives – and with Garner, it is from inner-city, communal living in Monkey Grip, to families in The Children’s Bach, to the enigma of the spiritual in Cosmo Cosmolino, to death in The Spare Room.

‘Stuart Jeffries’ group biography, Grand Hotel Abyss tells the story of the Frankfurt School, its central figures, and their most significant affiliates. The collective accomplishment of these thinkers, it shows, was to develop a critical theory with which to apprehend what it means to live and think through an historical period during which the left would achieve fewer and fewer victories.’ ‘

In writing No Way But This Sparrow seeks to reanimate not only the ghost of Paul Robeson but those of his family, friends and comrades. In other words, this book has an avowedly political goal. It revives Robeson as a model of integrity and bravery – someone who, despite the precarity of his social position, risked his life and career for the ideas of workers’ rights, black liberation, anti-colonialism and international socialism.

Buried in the endnotes of an essay on Angela Carter’s fiction by Lorna Sage – Carter’s close friend and one…

‘It doesn’t matter that Wulf’s The Invention of Nature is a bit breathless in keeping up with its dazzling hero, and a bit coy about his relationships, because above all the book is intelligent, an optimistic history, well researched, well written, and an ecological cri de coeur.’

On 11 October 1848 the Australasian Botanic and Horticultural Society held its inaugural exhibition, in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden. The…

A parallel narrative to the rise of Whiteley as an artist is the detailed account of his sexual promiscuity and his growing dependence on alcohol and drugs. This ‘other thing’ implied in the book’s title, unfolds for the reader like a train wreck caught in slow motion with drug busts and encounters with customs colouring further an already colourful biography.