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Jan 16, 2025 | 
themandarin.com.au | Nick Hordern
The title and cover of Great Game On tell us that a struggle is underway between Russia and China for supremacy in Central Asia. But by the time the reader has reached the book’s end, they are persuaded that China has already won and that there is more than just Central Asia at stake. The strength of Geoff Raby’s book lies in its deep historical perspective. The first Great Game was the shadow contest for Central Asia between tsarist Russia and the British Empire.
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Dec 16, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Nick Hordern |Arts Highlights
The title and cover of Great Game On tell us that a struggle is underway between Russia and China for supremacy in Central Asia. But by the time the reader has reached the book’s end, they are persuaded that China has already won and that there is more than just Central Asia at stake.
The strength of Geoff Raby’s book lies in its deep historical perspective. The first Great Game was the shadow contest for Central Asia between tsarist Russia and the British Empire.
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Nick Hordern |Arts Highlights
Vladimir Putin must be tried in an international court for ordering the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. He must be tried, not just indicted, and to do this a new international court explicitly intended to deal with leaders responsible for such territorial aggression must be created. Since the Russian president won’t appear before any international court, he will need to be tried in absentia.
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Jun 26, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Nick Hordern |Arts Highlights
Nilaveli, on the north-east coast of Sri Lanka, is a long way from Sydney’s S.H. Ervin Gallery, but when in 2017 I visited the exhibition Margaret Olley: painter, peer, mentor, muse, which traced the links between Olley and her circle, the name of one of her fellow artists took me straight back to the white sands of Nilaveli Beach.
Juanita ‘Mitty’ Lee-Brown (1922-2012) and Margaret Olley were almost exactly contemporaries.
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Feb 26, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | David McBride |David Mcbride |Kevin Foster |Sean Turnell |Nick Hordern
ABR’s annual double issue is packed with summer-reading features. To complement our Books of the Year feature (December issue), Australia’s top arts critics nominate 2023’s outstanding productions. Kevin Foster doesn’t pull his punches on David McBride’s whistleblower memoir, Emma Dortins reviews Kate Fullagar’s innovative biography of Bennelong and Arthur Phillip, and Frank Bongiorno considers Raimond Gaita’s tangle with life’s big questions.
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Dec 18, 2023 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Nick Hordern |Arts Highlights
Sean Turnell is an Australian economist who was detained by Myanmar’s military regime from February 2021 until November 2022. An Unlikely Prisoner, his account of the ordeal, has quite a personal tone as he relates his struggle with unjust imprisonment by a regime whose hallmark was ‘a mix of the needlessly brutal, the petty, and the incompetent’.
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Nov 29, 2023 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Nick Hordern
In August 1943, John F. Kennedy, then aged twenty-six, was rescued from the threat of Japanese captivity – or worse – by a few brave Solomon Islanders, in an operation coordinated by the Australian naval officer Reg Evans. Evans was one of the Royal Australian Navy’s ‘Coastwatchers’, intelligence collectors based perilously behind Japanese lines.
Kennedy had command of PT-109, a small wooden patrol torpedo boat that had been rammed and cut in half by a Japanese destroyer.
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Oct 15, 2023 | 
arichlife.com.au | Nick Hordern
To celebrate the upcoming publication of Nick Hordern’s new history of the beautiful Australian Lorraine Murray, we’ll be publishing three excerpts from Shanghai Demimondaine: From Sex Worker to Society Matron. It isis published by Earnshaw Books and you can find out more about all Nick Hordern’s works here. noun: demi-monde; (in 19th-century France) a class of women considered to be of doubtful social standing. (Lorraine Murray was born in Adelaide in 1910.
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Oct 11, 2023 | 
afr.com | Nick Hordern
The most important of her new friends was American writer Emily Hahn, the China Coast correspondent for the New Yorker. The two women were at the beginning of a lifelong and life–changing friendship, and Lorraine would appear as a character in several of Hahn’s books, including her 1947 novel Miss Jill. The 1930s were good years for war correspondents. There had been the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, which Knickerbocker covered from the Ethiopian side and Barzini from the Italian.
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Aug 25, 2023 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Nick Hordern
War and Punishment: The story of Russian oppression and Ukrainian resistance Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $34.99 pb, 428 pp Russia's War Against Ukraine Melbourne University Publishing, $32 pb, 216 ppRussiaTwo books on Russia and UkraineThe political scientist Karl Deutsch once said that a nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past.
