'‘This wonderful, mysterious and compelling collection of essays prompts us to consider Barry Hill’s unusual place in Australian letters…The essays are like jewels in a necklace, each glistening with its own beauty but together making something of greater elegance.’
—Tom Griffiths
'‘A rich gift. Thirty two invitations to share the speculative adventures, in friendships, in family, in the world of politics and moral and spiritual commitment, of “a man in his wholeness, wholly attending”. An extraordinary revelation of the considered life.’
—David Malouf
'‘Reason, as passionate analysis and the higher Reason of moral law, runs through this astonishing collection of essays as a lifeline cast to us in a loveless world bereft of justice. At last we have the proper lens for getting Barry Hill into focus: so varied and extensive is his accomplishment as a writer—in poetry, fiction, social and cultural history, and criticism—that we need this book to gather together in one place an adequate reflection of all that achievement. This is “Man Thinking”, in Emerson’s phrase—the work of a finely honed intellect and a capacious spirit—that educates us in the full range of our humanity. Like DH Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore, and John Berger—all of whom he writes about cogently—Hill shows how a life of writing is a life of thinking, when both the mind and the heart are animated by love and by reason.’
—Paul Kane , Vassar College
'‘These are intimate, stylish essays. This collection showcases Barry Hill’s remarkable intellectual curiosity and erudition. From questions of belonging and attachment, to global challenges of survival, belief and knowledge, Barry unflinchingly pushes through new frontiers to reveal, with passion and precision, new ways of seeing and feeling.’
—Julianne Schultz , Griffith Review (Publication summary)
'I have a suggestion. When you start reading Reason & Lovelessness, a new collection of Barry Hill’s essays, critical writings and reviews, don’t start with the introduction. Tom Griffiths’ foreword is thoughtful, expertly written and genuinely illuminating, but there is the faint archness of the academe in the tone, and it steers perilously close to sanctifying Hill’s writing and life. In the first essay of the collection, ‘Dark Star’, an interview with Christina Stead that Hill conducted in 1982 and which he revisited and rewrote in 2017, she and Hill discuss the reception to Patrick White’s then just published autobiography, and Stead says, ‘This, the autobiography, is the last thing they should read… This is his farewell, his sorrow, and everything that people would not understand unless they had read the whole life’.' (Introduction)
'Barry Hill’s collection of essays from the last four decades is commanding and impressive. Few could match his range of subjects: from Tagore to John Berger, Lucian Freud to Christina Stead – all, for the most part, carried off with aplomb. He catches the ‘raw’ edge of Freud’s studio – ‘worksite’ as Hill calls it – ‘the sea of bare boards that rise into so many paintings, the tatty chair, the piles of used rags on the floor and up the walls, the soiled flotsam of a painter’s toil, tossed aside like offal in an abattoir’. He characterises so well ‘the ambiguous aura of melancholy’ in Freud’s figures, with their paradoxical mixture of ‘implacable vigour’ and ‘their listlessness’, the latter the product of the exhaustion of the models compelled to pose for extended periods.' (Introduction)
'Barry Hill’s collection of essays from the last four decades is commanding and impressive. Few could match his range of subjects: from Tagore to John Berger, Lucian Freud to Christina Stead – all, for the most part, carried off with aplomb. He catches the ‘raw’ edge of Freud’s studio – ‘worksite’ as Hill calls it – ‘the sea of bare boards that rise into so many paintings, the tatty chair, the piles of used rags on the floor and up the walls, the soiled flotsam of a painter’s toil, tossed aside like offal in an abattoir’. He characterises so well ‘the ambiguous aura of melancholy’ in Freud’s figures, with their paradoxical mixture of ‘implacable vigour’ and ‘their listlessness’, the latter the product of the exhaustion of the models compelled to pose for extended periods.' (Introduction)
'I have a suggestion. When you start reading Reason & Lovelessness, a new collection of Barry Hill’s essays, critical writings and reviews, don’t start with the introduction. Tom Griffiths’ foreword is thoughtful, expertly written and genuinely illuminating, but there is the faint archness of the academe in the tone, and it steers perilously close to sanctifying Hill’s writing and life. In the first essay of the collection, ‘Dark Star’, an interview with Christina Stead that Hill conducted in 1982 and which he revisited and rewrote in 2017, she and Hill discuss the reception to Patrick White’s then just published autobiography, and Stead says, ‘This, the autobiography, is the last thing they should read… This is his farewell, his sorrow, and everything that people would not understand unless they had read the whole life’.' (Introduction)
