Books

Was Menzies's unprecedented electoral success merely a matter of luck, or did he make fortune bend to his will? On 30 November 1954, Robert Menzies became Australia's longest serving prime minister. Between the closely fought 1954 and 1961 elections, the...

Fred Williams kept a daily diary from 1963 until his death in 1982. Disciplined and meticulous, he recorded life in the studio, family life and his contact with artists, dealers and the art world-a page per day. At the beginning and end of each year,...

Monte grew up in a secretive century. She lived in a society where appearances mattered, and keeping them up often involved creating silence around ancestral origins, painful memories and personal desires. Monte Punshon refused to be labelled. She was,...

The eleven years that passed between the 1943 and the 1954 elections were arguably some of the most pivotal in Australian history. This was a period of intense political, policy and strategic transition, which saw a popular Labor Government and its...

Novelist, journalist and activist Katharine Susannah Prichard won fame for vivid novels that broke new ground depicting distinctly Australian ways of life and work - from Gippsland pioneers and West Australian prospectors to Pilbara station hands and...

Melbourne's aborted East-West Link - the massive, multi-billion-dollar inner-city toll road project that promised to knit Melbourne closer together-was divisive from the start. Intense picketing and protests, multiple court challenges, breathless media...

Climate and energy. Work/life balance. Mining taxes. Progress on policy issues like these is essential, and yet they have become subject to the most rancorous partisanship, the precipitation of culture wars, and have brought down governments. It is...

Prose poetry is a resurgent literary form in the English-speaking world and has been rapidly gaining popularity in Australia. Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington have gathered a broad and representative selection of the best Australian prose poems...

From the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1770 to classic children's tale Dot and the Kangaroo, Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver examine hunting narratives in novels, visual art and memoirs to discover how the kangaroo became a favourite quarry, a relished...

The Man Who Loved Children is Christina Stead's masterpiece about family life. Set in Washington during the 1930s, Sam and Henny Pollit are a warring husband and wife. Their tempestuous marriage, aggravated by too little money, lies at the centre of...

Axel Törneman (1880-1925) was one of Sweden's earliest modernist painters. He grew to work in several modernist styles, was one of the first Swedish expressionist artists, and became a part of the international avant-garde in art after embracing more...

From Augustine's City of God to Trump, the forms of nationalism across history. With the end of the Cold War and the triumph of globalization, many believed that nationalism was now a thing of the past: instead, the opposite is true. The essays in this...

A comprehensive and extensive study of architectural drawings from a historic collection. Gustav III's Collection including his own and other famous architects' drawings, accompanied Gustav IV Adolf during his exile in 1809. The collection was returned...

The Sampans from Canton is a collection of ninety-nine Chinese gouaches from the second half of the eighteenth century that depict in minute detail an entire community afloat on the water, with the various sampan vessels used for everything from the sale...

What history teaches us: writers and theorists on the lessons of the past. How can our understanding of the past help to solve our present political or economic conditions and conflicts? Edited by Swedish author Kurt Almqvist and historian Mattias...

The 2018 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, introduced the general public to the abstract mystical masterpieces of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862 1944). Based on a seminar held at the...

A handsomely redesigned edition of essays examining af Klint's final abstractions. The result of a series of lectures delivered during the 2016 Serpentine Galleries exhibition Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen, this volume gathers essays examining the...

The second installment in an epic and authoritative seven-volume Hilma af Klint catalogue raisonné: the pioneering abstractionist's beloved The Paintings for the Temple series Between 1906 and 1915, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) created 193 paintings that...

Hilma af Klint rarely exhibited her work during her lifetime, and her magnum opus, The Paintings for the Temple, was shown to the public in the series of exhibitions that started in 2013 at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and ended with the grand exhibition...

The drawings in this first volume of a new catalogue raisonné represent an intense ten-year period of Hilma af Klint's (1862-1944) life that would lay the foundation for her later achievements. In 1896, af Klint and four other women formed 'The Five', a...

This classic pioneering work by Åke Fant is now available in English translation for the first time since its original publication in 1989. Following her training at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and twenty years of painting, Hilma...

Hilma af Klint is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Now, for the first time, af Klint's works, some 1,600 in all, have been...

Hilma af Klint is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Now, for the first time, af Klint's works, some 1,600 in all, have been...

Hilma af Klint is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Now, for the first time, af Klint's works, some 1,600 in all, have been...

Acclaimed British architect Quinlan Terry's guide to more than 2,000 years of classicism in architecture. How do you draw a column? What distinguishes the different orders of columns, and is it really possible for anyone at all to learn how to interpret...

It has been claimed that around 14,500 wars have been fought since 3,500 BC. Humanity has only experienced 300 years of peace on Earth. During the twentieth century more people in total, were killed in wars, than during any previous century. Relatively,...

Sir William Chambers (1723 96) was a Swedish British architect who designed imaginative castle buildings and luxurious interiors as well as simple and rational utilitarian architecture: some of his most famous works include the Roehampton Villa, Great...

It is well known that, throughout history, royalty have built castles, fortresses and entire cities. However, less consideration has been given to individual monarchs who pursued an interest in architecture and in some cases acted as architects. It is...

"Consciousness is a scientific problem that is unlike any other. Our own consciousness, as Descartes noted, is the most indubitable feature of our existence. It is the most precious one, as well: consciousness is life itself, and for most people having...

At some point around two million years ago, we discovered that we could exchange one thing for another. Since then, humans have continued trading and exchanging things throughout economic history. Clever humans also invented capital, which we used to...

The Meaning of History is the senior thesis written by Henry Kissinger at Harvard university in 1950, when he was twenty-seven. More than 70 years later it is now being published for the first time. The thesis explores the thought of three distinct but...

Tracing the past, present and future of technology's impact on culture, industry and economics. In this anthology of essays, leading historians, academics and writers trace the influence of technology on industry and economics, warfare and espionage,...

How has the idea of liberty developed and evolved over the centuries? What does freedom mean for us today and what do we need to do in order to preserve the freedoms for which generations of men and women fought and even gave their lives? Liberty is...

Machiavelli's observation on leaders' challenge to balance power is just as relevant in our time with renewed military, economic and cultural conflicts as it was in 16th century Florence. China's growth, Russia's attack on Ukraine and the increasing...

Iconoclasm: Rejecting the past is a warning bell, an alarm, alerting readers to the threat against the tolerance and openness of democratic society. Iconoclasm, the breaking of images, is part of our history from the destruction of religious images in...

Hilma af Klint is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Now, for the first time, af Klint's works, some 1,600 in all, have been...

A gorgeous leatherbound compendium of flora, shells, rare insects and more from the golden age of curiosities. Featuring amazing reproductions of floral specimens, minerals, seashells and more from rarely seen collections, and beautiful engravings of...

How history is written: an anthology of classic texts from Thucydides and Machiavelli to Nietzsche and E.H. Carr. The admonition that we should learn from history is a well-known truism, but what does that actually mean? In other words, what is history?...

A revelatory introduction to the spiritualist abstractions of the Swedish painter and lifelong friend of Hilma af Klint. Until now, the Swedish painter Anna Cassel (1860 1937) had mostly been famed for her paintings of landscapes and urban environments,...

Kitchen hymns are the songs sung at home, not in the chapel; in vernacular speech, not Latin. The poems in Pdraig Tuama's new collection are a form of hymnody that arise neither from belief nor devotion. A man asks himself if he believes in God and turns...