Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Biography

'My first tenet is write about what is urgent. Good literature, I believe, arises out of a pressing need to express something. Isn't creative writing all about being possessed, seized, obsessed? It's like sexual desire: you cannot sensibly choose what to be attracted to. Urgent subjects reside in...

John Berger is one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker Prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers. As a TV presenter, he changed the way we looked at art through Ways of Seeing. As a storyteller and political act...

A former CIA officer and curator of the CIA Museum reveals the untold story of Ernest Hemingway's secret life as a spy for both the Americans and Soviets before and during World War II, and explores how his espionage activities influenced his literary work.

Helen Garner is one of Australia's most important and most admired writers. She is revered for her fearless honesty in the pursuit of her craft. But Garner also courts controversy, not least because she refuses to be constrained by the rules of literary form. She has never been afraid to write he...

"In 1939, as Hitler's troops march on Prague, a Jewish couple makes a heartbreaking decision that will save their eight-year-old son's life but change their family forever. Australian journalist Juliet Rieden grew up in England in the 1960s and 70s always sensing that her family was different in ...

During WW2, a group of Jewish refugees (intellectuals, writers, artists and athletes - most from Germany and Austria) escaped to Britain and were interned as 'enemy aliens'. In 1942, they were selected and trained to form a special unit of commandoes who would be sent back into Europe to play a s...

If China seems unstoppable, so too does its leader Xi Jinping. As General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and President of China, he commands over 1.4 billion people, in a vast country that spans the prosperous megacities of Beijing and Shanghai and desperately poor rural regions where f...

The remarkable life of history's first foreign-born samurai, and his astonishing journey from Northeast Africa to the heights of Japanese society. The man who came to be known as Yasuke arrived in Japan in the 16th century, an indentured mercenary arriving upon one of the Portuguese ships carryin...

This fully illustrated book is a celebration of Kate Middleton's first year as the Duchess of Cambridge. Includes events up until March 2012.

A laugh-out-loud account of a young family's misplaced confidence in themselves to become hobby farmers in rural Adelaide Hills, where their fantasies about life in the country are progressively destroyed and their almost total ignorance about everything agricultural is revealed... After buying ...