An internationally celebrated historian and highly original thinker, Inga Clendinnen compelled readers to re-examine accepted histories from new angles. Inga Clendinnen was one of Australia’s greatest writers and historians. This selection covers the full scope of her work, from Tiger’s Eye to Aztecs, from her Boyer Lectures to essays on all manner of topics. It is introduced by acclaimed historian James Boyce, who traces Clendinnen’s life and evolving thought. Boyce writes that Clendinnen’s ‘ability to write serious history for a general readership was unrivalled in this country ... Her writings are an enduring testament to the truth that while we might “live within the narrow moving band of time we call the present ... the secret engine of our present is our past, with its plastic memories, its malleable moralities, its wreathing dreams of desirable futures”.’ ‘With the profound moral concern of the best general reader, one of our finest historians brings the Holocaust close up and stares the Medusa down. Inga Clendinnen claims for history the same power as poetry or fiction to enter the silences and make them speak.’ —David Malouf ‘Her respect for the intelligence of her readers, her sacred sense of the moral responsibility of history, and her luminous prose won her a large and devoted public.’ —Tom Griffiths

Recreates the culture of the city of Tenochtitlan in its last unthreatened years before it fell to the Spaniards.

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And she considers how the Holocaust has been portrayed in poetry, fiction, and film.

This 2005 book tells the story of the first British settlers of Australia and the people they found living there.

From the author of "Reading the Holocaust" comes a celebrated memoir that reveals how the imagination can be liberated even when the body is disabled.

The newest selection of essays from one of Australia's finest historians and writers.Agamemnon's Kiss is a thrilling selection of essays by one of Australia's most celebrated writers.Inga Clendinnen writes about everything from the books that terrified her as a child to what history can teach us about ourselves and our own times. She describes visits to the beach and to a museum dedicated to the Holocaust. She recounts the experience of falling ill and the prospect of death. And she writes movingly about other people who have changed her own life.Many of the themes which are central to Clendinnen's work are teased out in Agamemnon's Kiss- Selected Essays, the way we think about the Holocaust and its perpetrators, and the investigative power of history.

A collection of pathbreaking essays on Aztec and Maya culture in the sixteenth century.

In QE23, acclaimed writer and thinker Inga Clendinnen looks past the skirmishes and pitched battles of the history wars and asks what's at stake - what kind of history do we want and need? What are the differences between memory, history and myth? Clendinnen discusses what good history looks like and, more specifically, what good Australian history looks like. She looks at the recent spate of books on our beginnings as a colony, as well as the vogue for popular story-telling accounts of key events in our past, such as Gallipoli. Why is there now a gulf separating popular writers and the historical professions? This is a characteristically original and eloquent essay that looks anew at one of the most divisive topics of recent times- how we as a nation remember the past.

Inga Clendinnen is an historian of extraordinary insight and power. She is also one of those remarkable people able to summon the strength to use a serious illness to review life an embellish skills. Following on from her earlier scholarly publications and particularly those about the Maya and Aztec cultures, she has more recently dazzled readers with her perceptive, courageous and imaginative approaches to the Holocaust, the impact of the First Fleet on Indigenous Australians - even her own life-threatening disease. Her prose, so wonderfully accessible, sings. It is with pleasure that the Friends of the National Library of Australia celebrate the life and contributions of this distinguished historian and gifted author. Essays by Morag Fraser, Alan Frost, Raimond Gaita, Michael Heyward and Caro Llewellyn.