Blogs about: Personal Musings And Reviews
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Femme Fatale: The Female Criminal. A Review
A few years back now, I leafed through City of Shadows, Peter Doyle’s bestselling collection of Sydney police photographs, with a kind of uneasy fascination. Dating from 1912 to 1948, the photographs … more →
The Vapour Trail
Femme Fatale: The Female Criminal. A Review
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Melissa Bellanta wrote 4 months ago: A few years back now, I leafed through City of Shadows, Peter Doyle’s bestselling collection of Sydn … more →
City Traces
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Melissa Bellanta wrote 6 months ago: I’ve been going back to plenty of the classic Australian urban histories lately, to oldies-but … more →
A muted enchantment: Review of Dancing at Lughnasa @ the Old Vic
Melissa Bellanta wrote 7 months ago: To merely step into the auditorium of the Old Vic Theatre in Southwark, London, got up at present fo … more →
La Clique at the London Hippodrome: a review
Melissa Bellanta wrote 7 months ago: The ultra-commercial end of the carnivalesque market. That’s the variety-show, La Clique, curr … more →
Dan Leno, The King's Jester: a review
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Melissa Bellanta wrote 7 months ago: He may have died in 1904 in a mental asylum at 43, but the Victorian music-hall comedian and pantomi … more →
Well no, actually: a review of Madame de Sade
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Melissa Bellanta wrote 7 months ago: The fact that a male Japanese playwright became intrigued by the life of the Marquis de Sade and cho … more →
A review of The Alchemist (a Bell Shakespeare/QTC production @ the Brisbane Playhouse)
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Melissa Bellanta wrote 9 months ago: Ben Johnson’s The Alchemist is based on the cruellest of premises and shouldn’t in fact … more →
On humbug and historians
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Melissa Bellanta wrote 1 year ago: Is it possible, do you think, for a middle-class historian to research past working-class entertainm … more →
Into a blaze of conflicting sensations
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Melissa Bellanta wrote 1 year ago: Last night on a jet-lagged stint of wakefulness, I read Jim Davis and Victor Emiljanow’s Refle … more →
On Bowery Gals &c
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Melissa Bellanta wrote 1 year ago: In her now-venerable book, City of Women, first published in 1986, Christine Stansell writes about t … more →
On film history (& why I shouldn't yawn)
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Melissa Bellanta wrote 1 year ago: I must admit I’ve never really been interested old films, or film history. People could talk a … more →
More about Nundle, 1930-40s
Melissa Bellanta wrote 1 year ago: More things my grandmother remembers of her childhood in Nundle. Her uncle Cecil Reichel and Kitchen … more →
A Nundle medicine show
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Melissa Bellanta wrote 1 year ago: Some time ago now I decided to turn oral historian with my grandmother, pumping her for facts about … more →
On Victorian anti-narratives
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Melissa Bellanta wrote 1 year ago: When Natalie Zemon Davis wrote Fiction in the Archives (1987), she was interested in fiction for the … more →
An absence of eloqence? Australian speech in the 1890s
Melissa Bellanta wrote 1 year ago: Once again I’ve been reading Don Watson’s exquisite diatribe, Death Sentence (2003). It … more →
A fortunate life
Melissa Bellanta wrote 1 year ago: While I waited at the hospital yesterday to have my wisdom teeth cut out (a succession of waiting-ro … more →
When the wind blows through the world so sweetly
Melissa Bellanta wrote 1 year ago: In a paper on the history of the Australian coo-ee, Richard White tells a story about a children … more →
Chasing the rainbow
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Melissa Bellanta wrote 1 year ago: One of the sweetest little tidbits of non-fiction I’ve read in a long time is Lisa Lang’ … more →
bleached light after the party sort of time
Melissa Bellanta wrote 1 year ago: Well, it’s my birthday today and I’m old enough not to want to say how old I am. I … more →
