Books & arts
A gateway drug to history
Kate Fullagar
31 October 2025
The curious afterlife of Samuel Pepys’s diary
Essays & reportage
In search of my father
Jennifer Nadel
15 October 2025
A visit to Australia helps unlock a mystery
Books & arts
Larrikins, legends and legislators
Frank Bongiorno
15 October 2025
Three new books explore the labour movement’s evolution
Books & arts
The making of the writer
Susan Sheridan
10 October 2025
Elizabeth Harrower’s two-part life
Books & arts
Now, down to business
Patrick Mullins
2 October 2025
“A catalyst, a provocation, and a reassurance”: Asa Briggs combined prolific history-writing with an extraordinary range of other activities
Books & arts
Certain ideas of France
Anne Freadman
16 September 2025
Gertrude Stein’s latest biographer continues the debate about her wartime activities
Books & arts
Cheer treatment
David Goodman
28 August 2025
Paul and Eslanda Robeson fused politics and music on their acclaimed Australasian tour
Books & arts
An exceptional life in the law
Dean Ashenden
21 August 2025
Lawyer, educator, judge and royal commissioner Hal Wootten never lost sight of “those on whom the law bore harshly”
Other Voices
Bodies by Joe
Alma Guillermoprieto
20 August 2025
With his strange machines and uncanny understanding of muscles, Joseph Pilates created an entirely new technique
Books & arts
Chock full of chutzpah
Brett Evans
13 August 2025
“Go to Australia. Now,” said the used car salesman in Toronto. And would-be impresario Lee Gordon did just that
Books & arts
Eighty-nine seconds and counting…
Tessa Morris-Suzuki
6 August 2025
Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow’s campaign against nuclear annihilation
Essays & reportage
George Johnston’s odyssey of war and peace
Paul Genoni & Tanya Dalziell
30 July 2025
Eighty years ago, with the Pacific war drawing to a close, the celebrated war correspondent set out on a perilous spiritual journey
National affairs
The jewel in the crown of the ANU
Tom Griffiths and Mark McKenna
22 July 2025
Celebrated by previous vice-chancellors, the Australian Dictionary of Biography and its fellow national project, the Australian National Dictionary, are…
National affairs
John Stone, political activist
Dominic Kelly
22 July 2025
The former Treasury head was revealed to be an arch-reactionary in his long second career
Books & arts
Richard Ellmann’s extraordinary achievement
Patrick Mullins
11 July 2025
An exhilarating account of a biographer at work
Books & arts
A stitch in crime
Jeremy Gans
9 July 2025
A prosecutor turned judge turned corruption czar looks back
Books & arts
The reformer
Emily Millane
4 July 2025
As Labor signals greater boldness, a seasoned policymaker and former MP describes how it’s done
Books & arts
A kind of elegy
Susan Lever
27 June 2025
An award-winning memoir honours cultures old and new
Books & arts
Something else
Sara Dowse
26 June 2025
Francis Picabia had never come across a woman like Gabriële Buffet
Books & arts
Millicent Preston Stanley’s vocation
Zachary Gorman
16 June 2025
The first woman elected to NSW parliament used any means possible — from petitions to theatrical melodrama — to advance her causes
Books & arts
Alone like a finger
Nick Haslam
13 June 2025
It was writing that “separated me from everything,” says German writer Judith Hermann in a captivating collection of biographical essays
Books & arts
Okay, you’re hired
Patrick Mullins
5 June 2025
A biographer’s apologia raises as many questions as it answers
Books & arts
How little one knows, really, of one’s parents
Caitlin Mahar
26 May 2025
French sociologist Didier Eribon goes in search of his working-class mother
Essays & reportage
A tale told by a historian
Anne-Marie Condé
30 April 2025
How Kathleen Fitzpatrick began exercising her historical imagination
Books & arts
Body politics
Alecia Simmonds
24 April 2025
A new biography of Beatrice Faust illuminates a distinct strand of Australian feminism
Essays & reportage
Anzac Iliad
Brett Evans
24 April 2025
Sidney Nolan’s remarkable Gallipoli series brought together disparate strands of the artist’s life
Books & arts
All in the family
Tim Rowse
14 April 2025
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has built a political philosophy on her family’s efforts to reconcile the past and the future
Essays & reportage
The fall of the myth of Singapore
Mark Baker
4 April 2025
A new book revives the debate about the behaviour of Australian troops in 1942
Books & arts
Stitches and holes
Anne-Marie Condé
24 March 2025
A new biography wrestles with the challenge of capturing a decade and a half of Miles Franklin’s life
Books & arts
Comfort ye my people
Andrew Ford
13 March 2025
For writer Charles King, Handel’s Messiah offers “the staggering possibility that the world might turn out all right”
© 2025 Inside Story and contributors | ISSN 1837-0497