Life Sentences Podcast
Author Caroline Baum hosts conversations about the craft of biography with experienced writers and newcomers alike. Guests discuss how they navigate sensitive territory while searching for the real story behind a person's life. The podcast explores both authorized and unauthorized approaches to writing about the famous and the forgotten. Across each episode, biography emerges as a high-stakes quest full of twists and turns.
Episodes
The Swashbuckler
Errol Flynn is still the most famous Australian actor ever to make it big in Hollywood. Best known for athletic and romantic leads in films like Robin Hood, he had lived the life of an entitled boss on plantations in New Guinea as a fortune hunter before being discovered on the beach at Bondi. His rapid rise to stardom in Hollywood was enabled by the powerful studio system operating at full
Walks on the Wild Side
Peter Matthiessen was a giant of American twentieth century letters, and the only writer ever to win the National Book Award in both the fiction and non-fiction categories. He was a complicated man who went to great lengths to escape the privilege he was born into. A comprehensive new biography The Lives of Peter Matthiessen by Australian biographer Lance Richardson sheds fresh light on the many a
Shooting the Shots
Before Ash Barty, there was Evonne Goolagong, the first First Nations champion at Wimbledon. She was a player endowed with natural ability but also handicapped by plenty of disadvantages. To develop her talent at tennis she has to leave home at a very young age and move in with her coach and his family, a story she told in a memoir she wrote many years later with her friend Phil Jarratt. No
In Disguise
After the success of her debut novel My Brilliant Career, Australian writer Miles Franklin faced a familiar problem: how to write her next book and what should it be about? Her UK publisher was not keen on her ideas and so she turned to journalism and went undercover to write an exposé of the life of a domestic servant. It was a revelation to her and to her readers: the behaviour of her emp
Mr Wollongong
Between 1974 and 1991 Frank Arkell was the flamboyant mayor of Wollongong. But his name is forever associated with the infamy of being accused of being part of a paedophile ring. In a sensational twist, he was murdered in his home. As the mayor of a major industrial hub, Arkell had ambitious visions of how the city could transform itself into a tourism destination with a more refined profil
The Very Model of a Modern Governor General
Authorised biographies, especially of those in high office, tend to suffer from being overly respectful if not downright deferential. But in the case of Juliet Rieden’s authorised biography of Quentin Bryce, the first female Governor General of Australia, authorisation means co-operation without editorial control. In this episode, Rieden explains her close relationship with her subjec
The Power of Two
In this very revealing memoir/biography hybrid, bestselling author Bryce Courtenay’s son Adam explores the motives and personality traits that shaped his father as a public figure and parent. As a pathological fantasist, Bryce could not resist making up stories about his ancestry and life experience growing up in South Africa. Later, he was able to harness his success in advertising t
A Second Chance
Elizabeth Harrower is not a household name in Australian writing, so how has she ended up with not one but two biographies, both published within a month of each other? By sheer coincidence, journalist Helen Trinca and literary editor Susan Wyndham both found themselves on the Harrower trail, working through the same archives, talking to the same sources, each well aware of the other. This double
My Sexy Sister
Australian poet Dorothy Porter blazed across the literary scene like a meteor. She was even more seductive in real life than on the page and broke many women’s hearts in her short but busy amorous life. Now her adoring younger sister, Josie McSkimming has written Gutsy Girls, a revealing memoir biography of her sister and their family, exposing some of the darker aspects of life with their Q
Big Fish
Although there are several biographies of big game fishing bestselling American author Zane Grey, none of them focus on his two visits to Australia. Author Vicki Hastrich is also a fishing enthusiast, so when she came across Zane Grey by accident, her interest was piqued. How had this handsome athletic man become the world’s first millionaire author? And why did he leave the US to set
Fearless
Fearless Beatrice Faust is an overdue biography of a significant reformist force in the women’s liberation movement of the 60s and 70s in Australia. Written by political scholar Dr Judith Brett, this lively biography returns Bea to the prominence she once enjoyed as a controversial media figure and activist, primarily championing abortion rights. But it also explores the shadows in he
French Wave
American film critic Carrie Rickey has written the first biography of celebrated French cinema pioneer, Agnes Varda. Varda was born in Belgium but found her creative community in the southern French port town of Sete, which cemented her love for the beach and for many other things that would reappear in her films, especially the ordinary lives of working people. She once said that if you op
Samurai Soldier Spy
The Bravest Scout at Gallipoli is a fascinating biographical investigation into the life of Harry Freame - a half Australian, half Japanese military Scout who defied the odds at the front in some of the most vicious fighting of World War One. Some believe he deserved the VC for his bravery but was denied because of being partly Asian. After the war Harry faces a new challenge: becoming a so
Austen-tation
To mark the sesquicentenary of Jane Austen’s birth, this episode is an edited version of an event for Sydney Writers Festival. Speakers are scholar of English literature Professor William Christie, bestselling author Jane Caro and First Nations author Larissa Behrendt. Each of them celebrates different facets of their admiration for Jane Austen in terms of her characters, and h
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
In 2024 a story appeared in the Toronto Star by Deborah Dundas that set the world of biography on fire. At the centre of it was Alice Munro’s biographer Robert Thacker, who has devoted thirty years of his life as an academic to a close archival study of Alice Munro’s work. It was revealed that Thacker had known for two decades that Alice’s daughter Andrea had been sexually
The Fictional Biographer
Dominic Amerena is a rising young Australian writer who has chosen a biographer as the central figure in his novel I Want Everything. His ambitious, unnamed narrator recognises an older woman at the city baths one day as Brenda Shales, a writer who was famous for two incendiary novels before disappearing from public view. Recognising an opportunity, he works his way into her confidence and she agr
Best Biographies
In a first for Life Sentences, host Caroline Baum welcomes a panel of four Australian biographers to discuss the biographies they have read and enjoyed recently. -Ryan Butta chooses Anthony Sharwood’s hybrid travelogue biography of Polish freedom fighter Tadeusz Kosciusko and also mentions Didion and Babitz, by Lili Anolik, which compares the lives of two gifted writers on the LA scene of th
Pillow Talk Part 2
Past biographies have always dismissed Pamela Harriman as a socialite who slept her way to the top, in a series of affairs and marriages that boosted her thirst for power. But Sonia Purnell argues persuasively that Harriman was in fact one of the most significant diplomats of the 20th century and that her motives were always those of ensuring peace and the best possible outcomes for the UK,
Pillow Talk Part 1
Past biographies have always dismissed Pamela Harriman as a socialite who slept her way to the top, in a series of affairs and marriages that boosted her thirst for power. But Sonia Purnell argues persuasively that Harriman was in fact one of the most significant diplomats of the 20th century and that her motives were always those of ensuring peace and the best possible outcomes for the UK,
The Good Wife
Race Matthews had a distinguished career as a federal politician and Victorian state Minister, but the highlight of his career was his time as Gough Whitlam’s Principal Private Secretary. A joiner from a very early age, he understood the power of working within an organisation to bring about change but his ambitions for reform and social justice were often thwarted years ago fac
Love Is Blind
Painter Charles Blackman described himself as a guttersnipe when he met and fell in love with partially sighted poet Barbara Patterson. Together, the couple became part of a bohemian crowd of artists who moved between Sydney and Melbourne, and helped shape Australian art for decades. Now their daughter Christabel has documented a significant, passionate and fruitful decade of their e
Literary Legends
Recorded live as part of Sydney Writers Festival 2024, this is a three way conversation between three biographers - Nadia Wheatley, Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham - about three literary legends: Charmian Clift, Shirley Hazzard, Elizabeth Harrower - three writers who experienced the twentieth century very differently but who overlapped in shared perspectives on their home country, Australia
Pole Position
Anthony Sharwood set out to investigate how Australia’s highest peak comes to be named after an eighteenth century freedom fighter and military engineer, Taddeusz Koszciuscko. The result is an unorthodox hybrid he describes as a travelography. The result is much more than a portrait of a remarkable figure of enlightenment and progressive ideals, whose influence was felt from his native Polan
Bitter Lemons
The official history of Australia may have forgotten colourful rogues like Tom Ley, but Mudgee painter Michael Bourke has painted a biographical suite of scenes that tell his life story in almost cartoonish images. He talks to Caroline Baum about how Tom Ley became known as Lemonade Ley and how he rose from abject poverty to become a Minister in the NSW government, before travelling to London and
Flash Madam
Caroline Hodgson took the name Madame Brussels to become the ‘flash madam’ of Melbourne in the post Gold Rush era. Her business sense for buying real estate and flair for style and comfort attracted the big end of town, as well as the attention of the press. As well as running a brothel, she was a wife and a mother, a fascinating character who showed care and consideration for her empl
The Huffy Hagiographer
When Caroline Baum interviewed Fleet Street veteran royal correspondent Robert Jobson about his new, very favourable biography of Katherine, Princess of Wales, the conversation did not go as planned.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The Queen of Celebrity
For decades, Kitty Kelley has held the reputation as the queen of celebrity biography in the US, writing juicy and revealing accounts of the lives of Jackie Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, The Bush family, Nancy Reagan etc. Now in her eighties, she reflects on how she got started as a journalist in Washington DC, and reveals some of the tricks and techniques that she used to get r
Lucky
Donald Horne was Australia’s leading public intellectual in the sixties and seventies and coined the phrase The Lucky Country in his bestselling book of the same title. The phrase has entered the Australian vernacular, and is often misused and interpreted as a sign of national complacency. Before he became an author, Horne had tried on many hats: as a journalist, ad man, and editor; later he bec
The Impresario
There has never been anyone like Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev. The Russian impresario shook up the dusty world of ballet, making it the centre of the avant garde in the early part of the twentieth century, especially in Paris where the premieres of L’Apres Midi ‘D’un Faune and the Rite of Spring caused shock and scandal. Born in a provincial backwater, Diaghilev made his way to St Peters
Superboy
Recorded in the lead up the UK election of 2024, this is a conversation with Labour Party Leader Keir Starmer’s biographer, journalist and former Labour insider Tom Baldwin. He explains how the biography was written with Starmer’s co-operation but was not authorised by him and how Starmer learns things from the book that he did not expect, but feels uncomfortable with some of the details about his
Brief Lives
Most people are unaware of the existence of the Australian Dictionary of National Biography, a remarkable effort of scholarship by an army of volunteer historians and specialist contributors committed to documenting significant and representative Australians. It’s a challenging task in terms not only of scale but because previous entries need to be revised in the light of fresh historical evidence
Two Bob's Worth
To fully enjoy this episode, it is recommended that you watch the documentary Turn Every Page about the unique working relationship between biography giant Robert Caro and his editor of fifty years, Robert Gottlieb. Robert Caro is regarded by many as the greatest biographer of his generation, thanks to the ambition, scope and meticulous detail of his 1974 best selling biography The Power Broker,
After The Dream
This content is from BIO, The US based Biographers International Organisation, which promotes and champions the practice of biography to writers and readers. You can read more about BIO here: https://biographersinternational.org/ In this episode award-winning biographer Jonathan Eig talks about why it was time, after more than three decades, for a new biography of Martin Luther King that explo
Biography Backwards
Historian Kate Fullagar tells the story of the intertwined destinies of Governor Phillip and First Nations leader Bennelong, beginning with their deaths and spooling gradually back to their first encounter. This bold, unconventional approach allows for a wider lens and different perspective on their respective personalities and achievements, and on the events which brought them together at a tim
Talking About A Revolution
An elegant Trotskyist, Michael Pablo grew up in Greece to become an urbane revolutionary, who made his presence felt at many of the most significant uprisings of the 20th century in an attempt to build what he called self-managed socialism. Partnered by his dynamic and fearless wife Elli Dyovoumoti, Pablo was often in great danger, spent time in prison, and made enemies among fellow socialists.
Acing It
She is part Japanese, part Haitian but trained and lives in the US. Nothing about Naomi Osaka is conventional, but she forged her career in the mold of her idol Serena Williams- and then beat her. Along the way, she struggled with mental health and admitted that in public, carried the Japanese flag into an empty stadium at the Tokyo Olympics during Covid, and attracted Asian sponsors desperate fo
By George
In George Harrison, The Reluctant Beatle, veteran rock journalist and biographer Philip Norman (author of the definitive Beatles book, Shout!) gives us an access all areas portrait of a paradoxical figure who found fame a burden but emerged from the band, to grow into a new creative phase of life that was rewarding and productive in unexpected ways. Based on extensive interviews with those who k
Healing Hands
Perth based skin and burns surgeon Professor Fiona Wood is one of the most trusted and admired figures in Australian life and yet it took her years to agree to biographer Sue Williams request to let her tell her life story. Time poor and a workaholic, she eventually relented. Williams also talks to her colleagues and patients and recreates the scenes on the ground following the Bali bombing to p
To Bee or not to Bee
One of the most puzzling and flamboyant women on the streets of Sydney in the twentieth century, Bee Miles became the stuff of legend, a celebrity in her own lifetime, but also a troubled soul who spent time in asylums and in and out of jail. In Bee Miles, Australia’s famous bohemian rebel, Rose Ellis uncovers a medical diagnosis that sheds new light on what caused Bee’s notorious episodes of mis
Playing By The Rules
Catharine Lumby is the first out of the gate of two biographers to tackle the many-faceted life of author Frank Moorhouse, who was a well known bon vivant, bushwalker and prolific author of fiction and non fiction. He was also an active campaigner on issues including censorship and copyright law. Lumby’s biography, Frank Moorhouse: A Life, is organised thematically and relies on her longstanding
Love In Code
Every Australian knows My Country, the poem that made Dorothea Mackellar famous at a young age. But very few people know much about her life. In Her Sunburnt Country: The Extraordinary Literary Life of Dorothea Mackellar, biographer Deborah Fitzgerald was approached by her descendants and given unprecedented access to her papers, including a diary she wrote in code. What secret loves was she hid
The Case Of The Incredible Vanishing Woman
Anna Funder has already garnered international praise for her non fiction (Stasiland) and fiction (All That I Am) In Wifedom, she does something new and bold, creating a hybrid of genres that brings together biography, memoir, fiction and feminist critique in what she calls ‘an intervention’ that examines how George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy came to be erased from the many biogra
The Petitioner
William Cooper was a remarkable Yorta Yorta man from Victoria, born in the 1860s who sought justice for his people by petitioning the British King for black representation in parliament. He believed that it was necessary to ‘think black’ to understand and implement justice for Aboriginal people. When he heard about the persecution of the Jews following Kristallnacht, he took a petition to the Germ
A Fraction Too Much Friction
Often acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest singer songwriters, and compared to Paul McCartney, who is a fan, Neil Finn has had a pretty regular life. He comes from a happy and musical home, which he shared with his older brother Tim. First in Split Enz and then in his own band, Crowded House, the brothers demonstrated a capacity to make joyful hooky music that became worldwide hits. But ther
The Mischief Maker
She was one of the finest poets Australia has ever produced but Gwen Harwood was also a very mischievous woman, who played literary pranks on editors who failed to publish her work. When marriage takes her to Tasmania, she hates the place. Her husband is an intensely jealous man who is totally uninterested in her work. She embarks on intense friendships with both men and women and passionate love
Uptown Girl
Nora Ephron had it all: success, love, friendship, a brilliantly original voice, personal style. As the writer of Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail, she demonstrated an acute ability to write about relationships between men and women that was bestselling and box office gold. Her essay collection, I Feel Bad About My Neck, showcased her talent for being simultaneously frivolous
Bland Ambition
Award-winning investigative journalist and political biographer Margaret Simons was hesitant about undertaking a biography of Tanya Plibersek until she made a surprising discovery of their shared enthusiasm for Jane Austen. Here, Simons discusses the differences between authorised and unauthorised biography and which Austen character Plibersek most resembles. She also talks about the impact of P
She Called Him Daddy
In the second part of this conversation John Lahr talks about Arthur Miller’s disastrous marriage to Marilyn Monroe how it came about and discusses the impact of success and celebrity on Miller, as well as one of his greatest and most relevant plays, The Crucible and The Misfits, the film script he wrote for Monroe, as well as his play about her, After the Fall.See omnystudio.com/listener for pr
All My Sons
Theatre’s most respected critic, New Yorker critic and biographer John Lahr has compressed his deep understanding of Arthur Miller’s life and creative process into a fascinating biography Arthur Miller: American Witness. In this revealing portrait, full of personal anecdotes from family and friends, and drawing on an unpublished memoir by a nephew, Lahr explores the connections between Miller’s
A rescued life
While Shirley Hazzard has many devoted admirers and readers, particularly for her best known novel The Transit of Venus, many would be unaware of her life story. She was a private woman, and because she lived in Europe and America, Australia had mixed feelings about her - and those mixed feelings were reciprocated. Now, in a superb new biography, literary scholar Brigitta Olubas provides a comp
The Woolf Man
In this episode, Sophie Cunningham talks about using biography as the thematic spine of her novel This Devastating Fever. The bold, playful narrative interweaves two strands: a modern day one in which Melbourne based biographer Alice is struggling to write a biography of Leonard Woolf, and a historical one, in which we meet Leonard in his life as a civil servant in Ceylon and in his marriage to Vi
The Power of One Plus One
Bryce Courtenay remains one of the highest selling Australians writers of all times, with sales of more than 20 million of his blockbuster stories of life in Africa and in Australia. Beginning with the Power of One, which became a classic, he took off as a novelist in his fifties after a successful career in advertising. But his beginnings were far from promising and it took all his willpower and
Don’t Put Your Daughter On The Stage
The family biography is a popular pastime, but few family biographies get published or are as colourful and bohemian as Sharon Connolly’s account of her vaudevillian relatives, including her great Aunt Gladys who was best known for her prowess as a whistler. Featuring a roll-call of rogues and eccentrics, My Giddy Aunt goes beyond biography to become a culture history of the disappearing age of
Favourite Son
How has Lachlan Murdoch managed to live comparatively below the radar given his immense power and influence as a media player? And why is it so important to him that he identifies strongly as an Australian ? Journalist biographer Paddy Manning answers these and many other questions about the heir to Rupert Murdoch’s dynasty and the threat posed by his siblings in The Successor, a biography who
A Pox On You
As a society figure in Georgian England, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was more than a hostess, gossip and subject of scandal. A sharp wit, she wrote essays that were radical in their ideas, and way ahead of their time. She was also an early pioneer of inoculation, a technique she observed and experimented with on her own children as a diplomat’s wife in Turkey. Friend to the good and the great, incl
This Was Love
In their heyday, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were the most glamorous and famous couple of stage and screen in Britain, he for his patriotic and patrician roles as Lord Nelson and Shakespeare’s heroes and villains, she as the beautiful actress who won Hollywood’s most coveted role in Gone with the Wind as Scarlett O’Hara. But the chemistry between them had a dangerous side, overshadowed b
The Mod Quad
In between the two world wars, a group of lesbian expatriate women from the US and UK found freedom in Paris to explore and foster creativity. They dressed differently and lived and loved with abandon. Some are well known to us today, like Gertrude Stein, some have been forgotten, among them Sylvia Beach, who took a risk and published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no one else would touch it. In this
Between the Lines
Award winning author Kate Grenville has an ambivalent attitude to biography. She leverages this by using its materials, particularly letters, to create an alternative version of events in her novel A Room Made of Leaves, about the colonial figure of Elizabeth Macarthur. But when she came to editing the original letters for a recently published collection, what else did she discover about Elizabe
Paint It Black
In this episode, First Nations guest interviewer Daniel Browning talks to first time author Alec O’Halloran about The Master from Marnpi, his biography First Nations artist Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri.O’Halloran had never written a biography before, but had bought a painting by the artist and become fascinated by his way of expressing his place and his culture. Over several years and many visi
The Queen of Brit Bio
Few biographers can equal Claire Tomalin’s reputation as the queen of British biography. After her beginnings in journalism, she’s had a long and glittering career writing about the illustrious lives of Dickens and Pepys, Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry James, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Katherine Mansfield - an amazing roll call. Modest and self-effacing herself, Tomalin has also shed life on wo
The Red in the Bed
Katharine Susannah Pritchard (1883 -1969) enjoyed early success as a writer, travelled internationally and married a war hero. Despite seeming privilege, her life was anything but smooth. In this episode, Caroline Baum talks to her biographer Nathan Hobby about uncovering the identity of her married lover, and how she became a passionate and uncritical follower of Soviet Communist ideology while w
Suburban Bohemia
When Charmian Clift returned to Australia with her husband George Johnston and their children, they left behind a creative Greek idyll and returned to suburban Sydney at a time of social upheaval. Charmian threw herself into her weekly column on the women’s pages of a major newspaper and used it to question whether the country had changed as much as people claimed it had during their absence. See
The Invisible Biographer
Caroline Baum talks to the doyenne of Australian biography Brenda Niall on the publication of her memoir, An Accidental Career, about her evolution as a biographer, which coincided with fresh interest in figures in Australian cultural history. Niall reflects on how the status of biography has changed, how she came to write about figures like the Boyd dynasty and the recurring themes of home and di
Stranger Than Fiction
One of the most perplexing figures in modern Australian literary biography, Eve Langley used her experiences as a teenager with her sister in rural Victoria as the basis for her bestselling novel The Pea Pickers. But many other aspects of her life remain a mystery to this day. Why did she spend seven years in a mental institution? Why did she change her name to Oscar Wilde? Why did she lose contac
Rose de Freycinet
In one of the most remarkable seafaring stories of stowaway adventure, Suzanne Falkiner tells the story of Rose de Freycinet, who could not bear to be parted from her husband and so, wearing men’s clothes, snuck on to his ship in 1817 to join his scientific expedition to the South Seas. In doing so, not only was Rose doing something highly illegal, but she also became the first w
MAKING IT UP: Colm Toibin on Thomas Mann
Multi-award winning novelist Colm Toibin tackles his second biographical novel in The Magician, about the German novelist Thomas Mann and his eccentric family. After writing The Master, his first biographical novel about Henry James, Toibin turns to another writer with a secret inner life as a homosexual who, like James, also lived in exile from his homeland. The Magician takes us fr
COUNTESS ANONYMOUS: Joyce Morgan on Elizabeth Von Arnim
When Mary Beauchamp, a musical young woman from a middle class family in Sydney married a German count, she became Elizabeth von Arnim. Soon disenchanted with marriage and motherhood, she shut herself away at her country estate and began writing bestselling books about her garden and the society around her. She continued to write while married to her wayward second husband, Lord Russell, and
MORE CAT THAN DOG: David Marr on Patrick White
It’s thirty years since David Marr wrote his landmark biography of Australian Nobel laureate, novelist Patrick White. In this provocative and revealing conversation, Marr reflects on his relationship with his subject and its enduring impact on him, admitting that although White could be a curmudgeon, Marr came to adore him. He talks about the significance of White&rsq
BROTHER AND SISTER: Justine Picardie on Catherine Dior
For the first time, in Miss Dior, British biographer Justine Picardie tells the unknown story of couturier Christian Dior’s younger sister, Catherine, and her courage as a member of the French resistance during the Occupation. With unparalleled access to the Dior archives and homes, Picardie builds a portrait of the close relationship between brother and sister during the war and the terribl
THE FORGOTTEN KENNEDY: Paula Byrne on Kathleen 'Kick' Kennedy
Kathleen Kennedy was JFK’s beloved sister. They shared a unique combination of physical charisma and personal charm, and a passion for politics and people. And they both had tragic, untimely deaths. In 'KICK', Paula Byrne’s affectionate biography, Kick comes to life as a woman of irreverent wit, who defied her formidable mother to marry out of her religion and into the British aristocr
A WILD HEART: Bernadette Brennan on Gillian Mears
Gillian Mears lived and loved with uninhibited intensity and produced novelsabout rural Australia written in prose that was poetic and visceral, in a uniquecombination of gritty and mythical award-winning novels and short stories. She also had a shrewd and playful sense of posterity. When she left a vastarchive to the State Library of NSW, it was with the clear intention that one day, abiographer
DESERT DAMES: Eleanor Hogan on Daisy Bates and Ernestine Hill.
Setting off into the remotest corners of the outback in her campervan, Eleanor Hogan retraces the journeys of controversial self-styled ethnologist Daisy Bates and gung-ho journalist Ernestine Hill, investigating the contested dynamic of their writing collaboration on the 1938 international bestseller, The Passing of the Aborigines. From today’s perspective, many of their ideas seem ra
THE LORD AND THE DUKE: Andrew Lownie on the Mountbattens and the Windsors
British biographer and monarchist Andrew Lownie exposes the character flaws in two of the most glamorous but morally dubious couples in the history of the Royal family - the Mountbattens and the Windsors. The Mountbattens - Louis and Edwina - share charisma, ambition and privilege as Viceroy and Vicereine of India in the turbulent period leading up to Partition. Their open marriage and numer
MAID IN FRANCE: Helen Castor on Joan of Arc
In Joan of Arc : A History, media-savvy medievalist Helen Castor goes back to original sources to strip away the myth from the story of Joan of Arc. What emerges from her forensic approach is a fresh take on the remarkable events that led to an illiterate teenage peasant girl being placed in command of the French Army. Castor is bold in her interpretation of Joan’s voices and sheds new light
LUCKY MAN: Hermione Lee on Tom Stoppard
Born in the former Czechoslovakia, Tom Stoppard became one of Britain’s most celebratedplaywrights, famous for his wit and intellectual dazzle in plays like Rosencrantzand Gildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Arcadia, and more recentlyLeopoldstadt. He wears success well, mixing with famous and glamorous friends, marryingtalented women and breaking up with them amicably. As he grows old
THE GO-GETTER: Della Rowley & Drusilla Modjeska on Hazel Rowley
When Hazel Rowley died, the Australian biographer was at the peak of her career, having cemented a reputation for writing richly engaging and throughly researched biographies of figures including Christine Stead, black American writer Richard Wright, and power couples Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre, and Eleanor and Franklin D Roosevelt. But how did the Adelaide academic achieve her
THE LONG GAME: Christopher Clarey on Roger Federer
What is the secret to Roger Federer’s dominance of tennis? NYT Sporstwriter and biographer Christopher Clarey has had unparalleled access to the player over twenty years and seen is development from gifted but temperamental teenager to global elite athlete, as he documents in The Master: The Brilliant Career of Roger Federer. In the course of this conversation Clarey talks about
A TALL STORY: Heather Martin on Lee Child.
Never before has a thriller writer had a biography written by a literary academic. But Lee Child is a global phenomenon who defies easy categorisation and Australian scholar Heather Martin is not only a fan, but convinced that he has real heft, earning him a spot among some serious heavy hitters. In this episode, she maps the trajectory of how Lee Child created his hero Jack Reacher in his own ima
NEVER SAY DIE: Heather Clark on Sylvia Plath
Weighing in at nearly a thousand pages, this enthralling biography is the eleventh of American poet Sylvia Plath. But its emphasis is very different, thanks to Heather Clark’s determination to counter the obsession with her death and focus instead on Plath’s blazing talent and vitality. With unparalleled access to archives and never-before published material, Clark reveals
BETRAYAL: Anne Sebba on Ethel Rosenberg
At the height of the Cold War, Ethel Rosenberg was the first woman in America to be electrocuted for a crime other than murder, accused of being a Soviet spy, together with her husband Julius. She was thirty seven and the mother of two small boys. In her meticulous biography, British biographer Anne Sebba separates out Ethel’s story from her husband’s and examin
