Neighbourhood watchers
WHEN literary critic Roland Barthes returned from a trip to Japan in 1950, he wrote a book about the experience, The Empire of Signs.
Geordie Williamson
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To precocity and beyond
SOME young writers arrive so fully formed you wonder in what direction they could possibly grow.
Tiptoe through the black tulips
STUART Kells’s life of Melbourne bookseller Kay Craddock is a shibboleth of sorts, a story password-protected for bibliophiles.
Auden’s acute anxiety over utopian politics
IT speaks volumes about the peculiar complexity of W. H. Auden’s genius that his longest and most ambitious poem should be his least read.
Incapacitated by longing, lust and love
FOR sheer perversity, no one in contemporary English literature can hold a candle to Adam Mars-Jones.
The spectre of angels and demons
HENRY James’s The Turn of the Screw is the creepiest ghost story in the language: a tale of such poised ambiguity that critics still argue its meaning.
Novelist’s struggle to emerge
ALR IN the early 1970s, Elizabeth Jolley worked as a cleaning lady. Since she was a woman of moderate means, this was not a matter of economic necessity.
Essays hit the mark with inside stories
HERE is a terrible admission for a reviewer with pretensions to objectivity: I often judge a book by its cover.
Served for a thrilling betrayal
A RENEGADE French spy with a false passport and a briefcase full of computer discs sits on the afternoon train from Milan to Rome.
Shadows over the landscape of the prosaic
GABRIEL Josipovici’s What Happened to Modernism? was the most controversial work of literary criticism published last year.
Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/author/geordie-williamson/page/25