'The new selection of essays from one of Australia's finest historians and writers.Agamemnon's Kiss is a thrilling selection of essays by one of Australia's most celebrated writers. Inga Clendinnen writes about everything from the books that terrified her as a child to what history can teach us about ourselves and our own times. She describes visits to the beach and to a museum dedicated to the Holocaust. She recounts the experience of falling ill and the prospect of death. And she writes movingly about other people who have changed her own life. Many of the themes which are central to Clendinnen's work are teased out in Agamemnon's Kiss: the question of black/white relations in Australia, the way we think about the Holocaust and its perpetrators, and the investigative power of history. Clendinnen is not just a brilliant thinker. She writes brilliant sentences too, and in these essays her full mastery of language is everywhere evident.' (Publication summary)
'THE TERM ‘HISTORY wars’ is best known in Australia for summing up the fierce debate over the nature and extent of frontier conflict, with profound implications for the legitimacy of the British settlement and thus for national legitimacy today.
'That debate, though hardly resolved, is now taking something of a back seat to a public controversy focused on Australia’s wars of the twentieth century and particularly on the war of 1914–18, called the Great War until the Second World War redefined it as the First.' (Introduction)
'The difficulty of writing as an autobiographer and simultaneously as a literary critic is that one trips the other up. My autobiographical self says I must write. I must follow the images in my mind. I must try to recreate my past, as bet I can, and fill in the gaps from my imagination. My unconscious will lead the way.' (Author's introduction)
'The difficulty of writing as an autobiographer and simultaneously as a literary critic is that one trips the other up. My autobiographical self says I must write. I must follow the images in my mind. I must try to recreate my past, as bet I can, and fill in the gaps from my imagination. My unconscious will lead the way.' (Author's introduction)
'THE TERM ‘HISTORY wars’ is best known in Australia for summing up the fierce debate over the nature and extent of frontier conflict, with profound implications for the legitimacy of the British settlement and thus for national legitimacy today.
'That debate, though hardly resolved, is now taking something of a back seat to a public controversy focused on Australia’s wars of the twentieth century and particularly on the war of 1914–18, called the Great War until the Second World War redefined it as the First.' (Introduction)
