Picks of the month
Spotlight: History Week
The CIA book club: the best-kept secret of the Cold War by Charlie English
The astonishing story of the ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA books programme’, aimed to win the Cold War with literature. From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s global CIA ‘book club’ would infiltrate millions of banned titles into the Eastern Bloc, written by a vast and eclectic list of authors, including Hannah Arendt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell and Agatha Christie. This is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation.
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Straya Day by Matt Murphy
The unofficial history of Australia's national day since the first contentious one, thereby offering 237 other reasons for a day off. Like it or not, 26 January in Australia has become a significant day of both celebration and mourning. What other reasons might we find to mark our national holiday? Some very significant, funny, tragic, curious and plain old ordinary things have also occurred on that date.
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Mythica: a new history of Homer's World, through the women written out of it by Emily Hauser
In Mythica Emily Hauser tells, for the first time, the extraordinary stories of the real women behind some of the western world's greatest legends. Following in their footsteps, digging into the history behind Homer's epic poems, she reveals who these women were, how they lived, and how history has (or has not) remembered them. Mythica is a ground-breaking reassessment of the reality behind the often-mythologized women of Greece's greatest epics.
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Weimar Germany: death of a democracy by Victor Sebestyen
The Weimar Republic was Germany's postwar experiment with democracy, and a time of unprecedented cultural, intellectual and artistic freedom. But beneath the glamour was a deeply polarised society of extremes plagued by economic disasters, populist leaders fuelling culture wars, and an uneasy political settlement that would soon spawn the horrors of Nazism. Covering fifteen years from the end of the First World War to Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in 1933, Weimar Germany tells the definitive story of Germany's interwar republic and descent into fascism.
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The visionaries: the making of post-World War II order in the West by James Holland
A penetrating examination of the consequences of the Second World War which draws uncomfortable parallels with the world in which we live today. From the world on the eve of war in 1914 through to the Versailles Treaty and the global financial catastrophe of the late 1920s and early thirties, The Visionaries takes a broad sweep of history with important lessons for today. It's a reminder that while history does not repeat itself, patterns of human behaviour certainly do.
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Book of the Month: August 2026
Double Act: Eirene Mort and Nora Kate Weston by Sylvia Martin
Double Act is a richly illustrated and important biography of the shared lives of Eirene Mort and Nora Kate Weston.
Sylvia Martin delves deeper into the unconventional lives of two of Australia’s prominent female artists. Turning a queer lens on Eirene Mort and Nora Kate Weston, Martin explores the deep and enduring relationship that underpinned their public creative partnership for over 60 years, drawing on the extensive papers, artworks, photographs and more in the National Library of Australia’s collections.
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Author Talk on Double Act
During History Week on Tuesday 8 September, join award-winning biographer Sylvia Martin in conversation with writer and journalist Susan Wyndham as they explore the pair’s sixty-year creative partnership, their lasting artistic legacy and the process of recovering women’s stories from history.
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