‘[An] unconventional journey...brilliantly documented.’ Courier Mail ‘So you want to know something about this funny old bowling of mine. Well, there’s nothing to it. It’s really very simple—in fact, at times, I do not know much about it myself.’ In 1950, aged in his mid-thirties, ‘tall, shy, shambling’ Jack Iverson burst forth from obscurity in suburban Melbourne, ‘bowled like no man before’ and became a national sensation, then faded from view almost as swiftly. He died in obscurity, in tragic circumstances. In the enthralling Mystery Spinner, first published in 1999, one of the world’s best cricket writers goes in search of an enigma: an ordinary man in whom lurked the extraordinary. Gideon Haigh has been a journalist for three decades, writing mainly about sport and business. He is the author of more than thirty books, among them the award-winning On Warne, Certain Admissions and Stroke of Genius. He lives in Melbourne. ‘One of the best cricket biographies I have ever read.’ Wisden Cricket Monthly ‘Even if you don’t care for the game you might enjoy it...Not your standard sporting biography.’ Guardian ‘A delight, a gripping (no pun intended) read, and an object lesson to anyone tempted to try their hand at biography.’ ESPN cricinfo ‘Magnificent.’ Roar
Few journalists exemplify the creed ‘without fear or favour’ like Gideon Haigh. Shelf Life selects from twenty-one years of writing on myriad subjects by one of our clearest thinkers, sharpest stylists and most curious journalists. Architecture and airline food. Depression and doodling. Goya and Grossman. Weegee and Wire. When not wiring about cricket, Gideon Haigh has enjoyed taking journalism on unexpected journeys, where curiosity calls, into the past and future as well as the present. Edited by Russell Jackson, Shelf Life samples his work from the last two decades: essays, reportage, reviews, crisp analyses, deep dives into history, of no camp, and independent of the news cycle, from his shelves to yours.
SHEILA FLORANCE ON THE INSIDE an Intimate Portrait Sheila Florance said with her characteristic irony, I set out aged nineteen with every intention of becoming the worlds greatest Shakespearean actress and ended up as Lizzie Birdsworth, the shearers poisoner! This much-loved character in the cult TV soapie Prisoner brought Sheila worldwide fame after fifty years of hard work during the formative years of the Australian performing arts. It culminated just days before her death at seventy-five with an Australian Film Institute Leading Actress award for her last film A Womans Tale. Onstage and off her life was theatre on a grand scale. Everything was extravagant about Sheila in the parties she threw, her humour and tall tales, her friendships, her anger and loves. As a fighter for justice, her approach was eccentric and front-on. She wouldnt have called herself a feminist yet she always battled for and supported women. She suffered a difficult childhood, war in England, the tragic inexplicable death of her eighteen-year-old daughter, two drama-filled marriages and a constant tension between her main passions family and acting. It was quite a journey yet Sheilas courage and determination to be true to herself never faltered. In this very personal biography, her daughter-in-law and confidante, Helen Martineau, reveals the fascinating public career and behind-the-scenes upheavals of a memorable and inspiring woman, who in her final illness found the peace that long eluded her. I bought the book as a kind of duty to the memory of Sheila. But I simply couldnt put it down. You captured her in all her moods and complexity. Elspeth Ballantyne; warder Meg Morris in Prisoner and Sheilas long-time friend Second updated edition first published 2005 as On the inside an Intimate Portrait of Sheila Florance
I disapproved of bankers, on principle. Not that I knew any. Until this job, I had worked and made friends with people who shared my views. Mostly moral, mostly kind. An unlikely candidate, then, for the job of executive speechwriter, to be putting words in the mouths of plutocrats deeply suspicious of metaphors and words of more than two syllables. An unlikely candidate, too, to be working for a firm...whose ethic was borrowed in equal parts from the Marines, the CIA, and Las Vegas. A firm where women were about as welcome as fleas in a sleeping bag. Wall Street in the mid-1990s: the recession is over and finance companies are gearing up for the next boom. Cath—wisecracking Australian-born ‘bedrock feminist, unreconstructed left-winger’—has given up freelance writing for corporate life at one of the big investment banks. Her husband, Bailey, has Alzheimer’s, and they need serious money. For seven years Cath lives in two worlds, both of them mad. By day she grapples with the twisted logic and outsized egos of high finance. By night she witnesses the inexorable decline of the man she loves as, ravaged by disease, he is 'reduced to a nub'. Wise, unsentimental and darkly funny, Kate Jennings' Moral Hazard is a crisp accounting of looming meltdowns—financial and personal. Kate Jennings was a poet, essayist, short-story writer and novelist. Both her novels, Snake and Moral Hazard, were New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and she won the ALS Gold Medal, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the Adelaide Festival fiction prize. She died in 2021. 'This is a unique book by an extraordinary writer, the great city illuminated from within. Kate Jennings brings all her powers of pace and tone to bear in a novel that is humane and unsparing; witty, unsettling, and wildly intelligent. I know of no other voice that so conveys the contemporary workplace in its vulnerability and its denaturing, and its difficult morality.' Shirley Hazzard, author of The Transit of Venus 'An engrossing, cautionary tale for the twenty-first century...with unsparing rapier wit.' Philadelphia Enquirer 'A work of considerable formal beauty.' Age 'The finest novel I've read this year...Don't let its brevity fool you. Moral Hazard is a big book in the truest sense of the word.' Salon.com 'Written in spare and starkly honest prose, this novel foreshadows the recent accounting scandals at Enron, World-Com and other companies, and shows that even in the midst of corruption and tragedy, individuals can stick to their beliefs.' Wall Street Journal 'Jennings is a writer of substance—and Moral Hazard is substantial writing.' Australian 'Compelling reading; Cath's thorny humour adapts well to both terminal illness and terminal greed.' New York Observer 'An insider's view of the city without the spin; a steely, unsentimental vision delivered with a poet's sure touch.' Bulletin 'An extraordinary novel: pleasurable and powerful, mordant and harrowing.' New Statesman 'A piercing novel, gleaming with facets of hard-won knowledge, polished by experience and a keen intelligence.' Publisher's Weekly
Edited by four leading law scholars, this volume explores the political and regulatory dimensions of modern 'criminality at work' from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives.
Wisden has grown through the years to embrace innovation and maintain its status as the most revered and cherished brand in cricket. The 'Bible of Cricket', Wisden Cricketers' Almanack has been published every year since 1864. Wisden's Cricketers of the Year Awards, one of the oldest honours in the sport, dates back to 1889. The Almanack, known for editorial excellence, has been a perennial bestseller in the UK. The fourth edition with India-specific content is even more engrossing. Contributors include Ramachandra Guha, Ian Chappell, Ajit Wadekar, Amol Rajan, Osman Samiuddin, Dileep Premachandran, Prashant Kidambi, Ruchir Joshi, Rajdeep Sardesai, Akash Chopra, Jarrod Kimber, and Jack Hobbs
Was journalist Dorothy Kilgallen murdered for writing a tell-all book about the JFK assassination? Or was her death from an overdose of barbiturates combined with alcohol, as reported? Shaw believes Kilgallen's death has always been suspect, and unfolds a list of suspects ranging from Frank Sinatra to a Mafia don, while speculating on the possibilities of reopening the case.
As enigmatic in life as in death, Mollie Dean was a woman determined to transcend. Creatively ambitious and sexually precocious, at twenty-five she was a poet, aspiring novelist and muse on the peripheries of Melbourne’s bohemian salons – until one night in 1930 she was brutally slain by an unknown killer in a laneway while walking home. Her family was implicated. Those in her circle, including her acclaimed artist lover Colin Colahan, were shamed. Her memory was anxiously suppressed. Yet the mystery of her death rendered more mysterious her life and Mollie’s story lingered, incorporated into memoir, literature, television, theatre and song, most notably in George Johnston’s classic My Brother Jack. In A Scandal in Bohemia, Gideon Haigh explodes the true crime genre with a murder story about life as well as death. Armed with only a single photograph and echoes of Mollie’s voice, he has reassembled the precarious life of a talented woman without a room of her own – a true outsider, excluded by the very world that celebrated her in its art. In this work of restorative justice, Mollie Dean emerges as a tenacious, charismatic, independent woman for whom society had no place, and whom everybody tried to forget – but nobody could. 'Haigh's narrative takes shape through powerful "layers of association" ... as much a portrait of Mollie's life and death as it is a portrayal of the city and the society in which she lived.' Australian Book Review 'In this latest addition to his true crime oeuvre, Melbourne journalist and polymath Gideon Haigh attempts to uncover Dean's life as well as her death... the book is a fascinating exploration.' The Saturday Paper
'A superb portrait of the most brilliant cricketer of his generation' Mike Atherton Shane Warne dominated cricket on the field and off for almost thirty years - his skill, his fame, his personality, his misadventures. His death in March 2002 rocked Australians, even those who could not tell a leg-break from a leg-pull. But what was it like to watch Warne at his long peak, the man of a thousands international wickets, the incarnation of Aussie audacity and cheek? Gideon Haigh saw it all, still can't quite believe it, but wanted to find a way to explain it. In this classic appreciation of Australia's cricket's greatest figure, who doubled as the nation's best-known man, Haigh relieves the highs, the lows, the fun and the follies. The result is a new way of looking at Warne, at sport and at Australia. 'Bloody brilliant... As good as anything I have read on the game' Guardian Winner of The Cricket Society and MCC Book of the Year
