Inside Story

A selection of recent Inside Story review essays

Donald Horne, citizen intellectual
A compelling biography captures the trajectory of the man who named the lucky country, writes Frank Bongiorno

Buckle and strain
In probing the shortcomings of George Orwell’s biographers has Anna Funder fallen into traps of her own, asks Patrick Mullins

Stolen moments
Caught between their home villages and the city, a generation of Chinese migrant workers struggles for intimacy, writes Linda Jaivin

Literary midwifery
A biography of two very different editors illuminates literary life in postwar Australia, writes Ryan Cropp

Western civilisation and its discontents
A mix of ingenuity, creativity, contradiction and collaboration unsettles the much-vaunted concept of “the West,” writes Kate Fullagar

President Wilson on the couch
What happened when a diplomat teamed up with Sigmund Freud to analyse the president, asks Nick Haslam

University challenge
A consummate account of Australian universities stops short of exploring the working lives of academics, writes Ruth Barcan

Active and ongoing
Is Chanel Contos’s Consent Laid Bare part of a trend back to radical feminism — with a twist, asks Alecia Simmonds

A dynamic of acceptance and revolt
The extraordinary Jack Lindsay deserves to be better known, argues Paul Gillen

The voice of Alexis Wright
Wright’s novels paradoxically activate readers’ critical faculties while compelling us to trust the narrative voice, says Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

Anti-globalism’s cauldron
The Great War brought the drive for international trade and cooperation to a disastrous end, writes Ruth Balint

This house of Grieve
A murder case looked different close-up for a journalist with worries of his own, writes Jeremy Gans

Neverending story
Gabrielle Carey gives us James Joyce in eighty-four bite-sized pieces. Peter Marks reviews the result

Yes, it is funny
Robert Phiddian on how the comic genius of John Clarke found its anchor

Writing life
A new biography of Frank Moorhouse approaches its subject differently, writes Susan Lever

Writing the history of the present
Russia’s war against Ukraine is generating a rich historiography, writes Mark Edele