MYTH AND HISTORY – SEEKING THE END OF THE TZARS RASPUTIN AND THE DOWNFALL OF THE ROMANOVS By Antony Beevor Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2026 ISBN- 978 1 3996 1762 8 RRP: $55 (HB) By Anne Henderson Increasingly stories and events of the past are being rewritten or revamped as the modern era of 24/7 media [...]
TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY HEROES OF STALIN’S TERROR TO THE SUCCESS OF OUR HOPELESS CAUSE, THE MANY LIVES OF THE SOVIET DISSIDENT MOVEMENT by Benjamin Nathans Princeton University Press, 2024 ISBN: 9780691117034 RRP: $79.99 (HB), eBook AUD $27.99 Reviewed by Keith Harvey. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet [...]
THE ROYAL COMMISSION, THE BISHOP, AND THE UNCHALLENGED EVIDENCE THE ROSE AND THE FIRE: A BIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED AND JOY HOLLAND By Jonathan Holland Connor Court, 2025 ISBN: 9781923568198 RRP - $39.95 (pb) Reviewed by Michael Giffin In the Introduction to his deeply moving biography of his parents - Alfred and Joy Holland - Jonathan [...]
THE LAST BATTLE – AUSTRALIAN SAS, COMMANDOS AND OUR GREATEST VICTORY IN OUR LONGEST WAR By Aaron Patrick Pan Macmillan Australia 2025 ISBN: 9781761776533 RRP: $39.99 (PB) Reviewed by Anne Henderson In 1966, a DeLuxe Colour film What did You do in the War Daddy? came out of Hollywood. It was a comedy set during [...]
AUSTRALIA: A HISTORY By Tony Abbott HarperCollins 2025 ISBN: 9781460718995 RRP: $50 Reviewed by Gerard Henderson Without question, Tony Abbott, Australia’s 28th prime minister, is a great communicator. As a politician this was evident when leading the Liberal Party/Nationals Coalition to victory over the Kevin Rudd-led Labor Party government in September 2013 Abbott promised that, if [...]
JOAN LINDSAY – THE HIDDEN LIFE OF THE WOMAN WHO WROTE PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK By Brenda Niall Text Publishing Melbourne Australia 2025 ISBN: 9781923058019 RRP: $36.99 (PB) Reviewed by Anne Henderson In these days of personal intrusion – on social media and much more - on the lives of the famous or those who [...]
EMPIRE OF THE ELITE – INSIDE CONDÉ NAST, THE MEDIA DYNASTY THAT RESHAPED THE WORLD By Michael M Grynbaum Coronet (Hodder & Stoughton) 2025 ISBN: 9781399707220 RRP: $34.99 (PB) Reviewed by Anne Henderson When the movie The Devil Wears Prada, featuring lead character Miranda Priestly as a fictional Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, appeared on [...]
UNSETTLED – A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME AND PLACE By Kate Grenville Black Inc 2025 ISBN: 9781760645649 RRP: $36.99 (PB) Reviewed by Anne Henderson As Chaucer in his Prologue to The Canterbury Tales wrote, the coming of spring “longen folk to goon on pilgrimages”. The ancient notion of pilgrimage was a journey to a holy place, [...]
PAUL HASLUCK by Anne Henderson Reviewed by Geoffrey Lehmann What emerges from Anne Henderson’s masterly 85-page biographical monograph on Paul Hasluck is how principled he was – how essentially good. Hasluck must rate a high distinction for goodness. As I read Henderson’s short book, I could not stop rating Hasluck’s contemporaries. In historical order these [...]
FLY, WILD SWANS by Jung Chang HarperCollins Publishers Australia - 2025 ISBN: 9780008661083; ISBN 10: 0008661081 RRP: $37.99 PB, E-book $19.99 “CONSCIOUS OF WRITING ABOUT PURE EVIL” Chinese-born writer Jung Chang is perhaps best known as the author of Wild Swans – Three daughters of China, first published in 1991, which has sold millions of copies worldwide. [...]
