If we’re going to grasp what makes Eakins’ art so tragically powerful, we should be honest about the man who made them – and the impulses that drove him.
Less than a third of biographical entries on Wikipedia are about women.
aradaphotography/shutterstock.com
Women’s History Month is a time to recognize female role models. In mathematics, when we think of powerful women, we should think of Marion Walter.
Christina Ricci as Zelda and David Hoflin as F. Scott in the TV series Z: The Beginning of Everything (2015). Two films about Zelda’s life are currently underway, starring Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Lawrence respectively.
Amazon Studios, Killer Films, Picrow
During her lifetime, Zelda Fitzgerald’s creativity and contribution to her husband’s work were woefully undervalued. Two new films will tell her story.
A scene from Bangarra Dance Theatre’s 2014 work Patyegarang. An Eora woman, Patyegarang became the main informant for William Dawes, the first European to sympathetically chronicle the language and culture of the Sydney landowners.
Jess Bialek/AAP
Just 210 of nearly 13,000 biographical entries in the Australian Dictionary of Biography are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women. A new project aims to change this.
Helen Garner: her work frequently polarises readers.
Nicholas Purcell Studio
Over 40 years, author Helen Garner has delighted, infuriated, confused and charmed readers. A new account of her writing life is informative but avoids delving into the trickier aspects of her work.
John Clarke: he particularly hated management speak.
AAP
Judith Wright was possibly our greatest poet and a passionate social activist. But a new biography suggests that in writing her family memoirs, Wright avoided evidence that her settler forebears likely participated in the murder of Aborigines.
Writer Thomas Wolfe is played by Jude Law in ‘Genius.’
Wikimedia Commons
The president of the Thomas Wolfe Society explains why Law had his work cut out for him when he agreed to portray a man who was “a hydroelectric plant of emotion.”
Victorian-era, middle-class black women who loved to read and write didn’t have many role models.
Jeffrey Green
When biographer Gretchen Gerzina came across an old British newspaper article calling Sarah E. Farro “the first negro novelist,” she wondered: who was Farro, and why had she been lost to history?
Former British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes.
The Spectator
After Jonathan Bate, in his recent biography of Ted Hughes, wrote about Hughes’ salacious sex life, a number of critics – including Janet Malcolm – were quick to pounce.
Dev Patel plays Ramanujan (right) with Jeremy Iron’s as his Cambridge mentor G H Hardy (left) in The Man Who Knew Infinity.
Icon Films
Srinivasa Ramanujan was one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century. His story is told in the movie The Man Who Knew Infinity, screening tonight in selected cinemas in Australia.
Italy’s most notorious politician has been treated as a laughing stock for years – but a new book about his life and career makes the truth all too clear.
At the opening night of her private view and book launch, poet and artist Frieda Hughes appeared at the door of the Belgravia Gallery in Mayfair, a small but striking figure in a pillarbox-red suit. In…
There are thousands of entries of famous, notorious, and almost unknown Australians in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
Sir Donald Bradman and Larry Adler, AAP Image/Universal Music
The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) is Australia’s largest and longest-running social sciences and humanities project. Set up in 1957, it has been publishing short accounts of significant and…
Kevin Rudd faces the media after losing the prime ministership in the 2010 party leadership spill.
AAP/Alan Porritt
Why would anyone want to be prime minister? Why indeed? It is a job that will almost certainly end in failure. Only one prime minister in the last 100 years has left office at the time of his own choosing…
Cullen possessed a natural likeability, even an awkward politeness.
AAP Image/Paul Miller
Adam Cullen, Australian artist and winner of the 2000 Archibald Prize, died just over two years ago at the age of 46. He spent the last three years of his life working with a young writer, Erik Jensen…
Managing Director, Triple Helix Consulting; Chief Executive Officer, Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research; Professorial Fellow, ANU Fenner School for the Environment and Society, Australian National University