Reviewed by Ian Lipke With memories of the Three Crooked Kings series still fresh in my mind I turned to Matthew Condon’s The Night Dragon. Readers who want to be titillated by stories of criminals doing crooked things, or committing murderous crimes, might get off on these books, but they are not a genre I

Reviewed by Norrie Sanders At the turn of the last century, two extraordinary people from opposite sides of the world fell in love, built a house in the Tasmanian forest and laid the foundation for one of Australia’s greatest national parks. Gustav Weindorfer grew up in the Austrian Alps and migrated to the antipodes in

Reviewed by Dr Kathleen Huxley In this concise pocket-sized book, the author Alexander Tulloch presents us with a comprehensive list of Greek words which have influenced English vocabulary. His aim, which he clearly states in the Introduction, “is to concentrate mainly on the ‘surprises’, by which I mean commonly used words which may even raise

Reviewed by Dr Kathleen Huxley This book is written by the founder of the Neuroscience Academy: the respected, Oxford-educated neuroscientist Dr Sarah McKay. She is a specialist who works on presenting scientific research about the brain to mainly professional audiences, translating this information into straightforward, actionable strategies for obtaining peak performance, creativity, health and wellbeing.

Reviewed by Ian Lipke It was refreshing to read of a hero of the Second World War whose name has remained unheralded until now. I had thought that there were no stories of the French Resistance movement still to be told. Certainly nothing of the calibre of Virginia Hall whose exploits have been documented in

Reviewed by Angela Marie ‘ Normally, when I’ve got Sunny, people are pretty friendly. It’s like having a dog means you can’t be a psychopath, or something. People will talk to a complete stranger if that person has a dog with them, but will cross the street to avoid someone on their own.    

By Wendy Lipke This academic book by Anne-Louise Willoughby highlights the work of the daughter of well-known Australian artist Hans Heysen. Due to the influence of the men in her life as well as the outbreak of war and the social constraints of the day, her work was sidelined in the art world that was