Joyce Morgan is the author of three books: two about creative Australians and one about the discovery of the world’s oldest printed book. Her biography of artist Martin Sharp was long-listed in 2018 for the Stella Prize, Australia’s key award for female writers. Joyce has been a journalist for four decades in Australia, England and Hong Kong, specialising in Arts and Culture. A veteran traveller, Joyce also leads cultural tours to Asia and beyond.
Tour: Lands of the Lotus
Embark on an awe-inspriring journey through Laos and Cambodia, delving into the pinnacle of Khmer magnificence.
Review: The Book of Mormon
★★★★
Capitol Theatre
July 24, until December 21
Assume the missionary position – it’s the Mormons’ second coming.
It is easy to make fun of this conservative all-American religion, replete with golden plates and sacred underwear. But the tone of the musical is more affectionate than sneering.
Arts: Inside the restless mind of Eric Whitacre
Grammy-winning composer Eric Whitacre took a deep breath and pitched his germ of a musical idea to the head of London’s BBC Proms.
“It would be Vangelis meets Thomas Tallis,″ he says.
Book: The Countess from Kirribilli.
Elizabeth von Arnim may have been born on the shores of Sydney Harbour, but it was in Victorian London that she discovered society and society discovered her. She made her Court debut before Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, was pursued by a Prussian count and married into the formal world of the European aristocracy. It was the novels she wrote about that life that turned her into a literary sensation on both sides of the Atlantic and had her likened to Jane Austen. Her marriage to the count produced five children but little happiness. Her second marriage to Bertrand Russell’s brother was a disaster. But by then she had captivated the great literary and intellectual circles of London and Europe. She brought into her orbit the likes of Nancy Astor, Lady Maud Cunard, her cousin Katherine Mansfield and other writers such as E.M. Forster, Somerset Maugham and H.G. Wells, with whom it was said she had a tempestuous affair. Elizabeth von Arnim was an extraordinary woman who lived during glamorous, exciting and changing times that spanned the innocence of Victorian Sydney and finished with the march of Hitler through Europe.