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Book reviewers are questioning the terms of William Morrow’s new process for bloggers who want review copies. In the News: Reviewers Revolt, No Recall

And Czech out this digitized 1959 recording of Flannery O’Connor reading A Good Man like Jozef Imrich Is Hard to Find ;-)


When the world was young Sunlit memories - Telling the GREAT GLOBAL (American) story
Ah, the apple trees,
Sunlit memories,
Where the hammock swung,
On our backs we'd lie;
Looking at the sky,
Till the stars were strung,
When the world was young.
This moment, this minute,
And each second in it
Will leave a glow upon the sky,
And as time goes by,
It will never die.
-Johnny Mercer When the World Was Young
Via Carpe Libris – of when the parliamentary library world was young

"The fact that the rule of law was the only thing we had to hold this country in place morally I found an interesting story," Redford says. "This was an example of how the Constitution was rearranged to satisfy political interests at that time." The contemporary parallels are obvious but Redford invokes them anyway, pointing to the "constant threats" to the US Constitution through some "pretty big events in American history that were threats to the moral standing of our country", including McCarthyism, the John F. Kennedy assassination, Watergate and the Iran-Contra affair.You have these patterns that have repeated themselves over time. And it's usually the same people, the same mentality, the same personalities that threaten that. . I find that interesting because I suspect that if we as Americans had a better value of history we wouldn't be repeating these things but I think we have a short-term memory.

• My global business card states: I will disappoint you – Do not Bother Telling the GREAT GLOBAL (American) story ; [The Book Depository is not Amazon - although it was purchased by the latter, it remains an icon driven, illustrative and content rich site to explore and from which to discover new titles, inexpensive older ones, read reviews and share ratings, and learn about upcoming releases. This site sells books and e-books, and you can also watch "The Book Depository Live - Thousands of customers all over the world enjoying our free worldwide shipping." Users may: Set your default eBook reader and format (39 devices are listed), read the blog, use the advanced search options, or browse for titles by topic, read the site's wonderfully designed, direct and personal Twitter feed, and remain hopeful that the folks who run this book site maintain what still looks and feels like a magical little kingdom for bibliophiles all around the world The Book Depository is not Amazon ; The World Wide Web Foundation is very pleased to announce an exciting new initiative: the World Wide Web Index. We thank Google for a generous grant of US $1 million to the Foundation, which we are using to seed the creation of the Index...What is the Web Index? The Web Index will be the world’s first multi-dimensional measure of the Web and its impact on people in a large number of countries. It will be a composite index, incorporating political, economic, social, and developmental indicators, as well as indicators of Web connectivity and infrastructure ; Born in the Soviet Union, buried in Venice, a citizen of America, the poet Joseph Brodsky was a nowhere man – a universalist and a cosmopolitan Brodsky ]
• · With Greece and Ireland in economic shreds, while Portugal, Spain, and perhaps even Italy head south, only one nation can save Europe from financial Armageddon: a highly reluctant Germany. The ironies—like the fact that bankers from Düsseldorf were the ultimate patsies in Wall Street’s con game—pile up quickly as Michael Lewis investigates German attitudes toward money, excrement, and the country’s Nazi past, all of which help explain its peculiar new status It’s the Economy, Dummkopf! ; They’re the stories that you prefer to keep locked up in your chamber of secrets. These are hard stories to tell. But they need to come out. Not for the shock value or a good sob story. But because they’re important. Every story has the right to be heard
• · · Without it, the fact a B-list businessman was killed, butchered and burnt after a sordid sexual encounter would be almost forgotten by now. Rockefeller Sex, sleaze and secrets in revealing book ;Films about geniuses are so numerous that they almost constitute their own genre. One seems to pop up every few years, always with a few distinct markers. Genius Films About Genius (and Other Pretenders)
• · · · Assessing fall's crop of sitcoms about men who are unemployed, underemployed, or in desperate need of a makeover Primetime's Looming Male Identity Crisis ; As the list of politicos laid low by sexual scandal grows longer, history offers lessons on when the press should opt for exposure—and when it should leave well enough alone Sex and the Married Politician
• · · · · You can almost hear the clicks of barbecues firing up in unison around Australia. Whether it's sausages, steaks or prawns, there is nothing more quintessentially Australian than casual barbecuing affairs ; Wilhelm Imrich aka Reich, the father of the sexual revolution, started out as a star pupil of Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology. Breaking with religious teachings that the sole function of sex ought to be procreation and that any other erotic pursuit was sinful, Reich offered a new and defiantly humanist perspective, asserting that sexual pleasure was beneficial—indeed, necessary—to human flourishing, and that, when it came to orgasms, the more the merrier. Sex, that voyage of discovery for generation after generation. ; From seamstress to mistress to magnate, Coco Chanel never kept her little black dress on for very long.. Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War
• · · · · · T.S. Eliot was one of the world’s unhappiest people. His life was a nightmare of anxiety. But misery stirred creativity... ; Literature and the psychology lab A suggestion about how to read – treat it as an exercise in pretence Novelists are thought to be uniquely perceptive about human nature, but does reading fiction increase knowledge? Clarify emotions? Deepen sympathy? Literature and the mind ; In V.F.’s October issue, A. Scott Berg recounts the discovery of a literary treasure trove: a cache of Ernest Hemingway’s early correspondence, for decades kept hidden at the late novelist’s estate in Cuba. Here, in greater detail, are some of the letters Hemingway wrote as a young man Ernest Hemingway’s Early Life in Letters

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... Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of
trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is, many persons
strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism. ...”
- author unknown, 1692, Desiderata

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.
-Enoch Powell, Joseph Chamberlain

Film schools are trade schools playacting as art schools and moonlighting in business courses. Their value is dubious, but the demand is insatiable. If you want to be a filmmaker and you can’t afford film school, know that you don’t really learn anything in film school anyway. They can never teach you how to tell a story anyway, or all you’ll do is tell stories like everyone else. You learn to tell stories by telling stories. And you want to learn your own way of doing things. moonlighting

The Cinema is Dead. Long Live the Cinema! Life … at 24 frames per second
According to Nielsen BookScan, the publishing industry standard for book sales data, book sales are pretty healthy, with one significant proviso which I'll come to. Ten years ago in 2001, 162m books were sold in Britain. Ten years later – a decade in which the internet bloomed, online gaming exploded, television channels proliferated, digital piracy rampaged and, latterly, recession gloomed – 229m books sold. So, a 42% increase in the number of books sold over the last 10 years...For one thing, people are buying more and more books in Amazonia, and more and more of them are on Amazon's ebook platform the Kindle. In May this year, Amazon announced that, for the first time, it was selling more Kindle versions of books than paperback and hardbacks combined, and (here's the thing that doesn't get quoted so often) sales of print books were still increasing."

Like many industries over the last 30-plus years, cinema has had its share of setbacks. Technological advances, from the rise of VHS, the rental market, DVD subscription services, and most recently the threat of downloads (both legally via Video on Demand and illegally) together with the shortening of theatrical windows and digital conversion have led many to predict the demise of cinemas.

• Reele Life [If you’re looking for new ways to get around for fun or to work, or might be trying to live a greener lifestyle in 2012, why not try biking? New Biking Directions Legend on Google ; Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For "Fat paychecks, sweet perks, fun colleagues, and over 70,000 jobs ready to be filled -- these employers offer dream workplaces. Like Google, which reclaims the top spot this year to become a three-time champion. Meet this year's top 100; The National Archives is preserving government information published on the web by archiving UK Central Government Websites..The UK Government Web Archive has received more than a billion hits since it was launched by The National Archives in 2003 and is now one of the most-visited websites in government. UK Government Web Archive; fMRI’s and free will. Imagine a neuroscientist knowing what you’ll decide before you do. Is
consciousness a biochemical afterthought?...]
• · In today’s expanding cities, social skills are becoming ever more essential to economic growth. The history of human progress is intimately intertwined with that of cities. The Epic of Gilgamesh—perhaps the oldest known work of literature—closes with an awed description of the walls of the city of Uruk. Plato’s Republic—which envisioned an ideal city—was a product of the cultural and intellectual flowering of the earthly city of Athens, as well as a broadside against its politics. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Brunelleschi, da Vinci, and Michelangelo all were born in or near the city of Florence. Great thinkers, artists, and entrepreneurs—what I call the creative class—rarely come out of nowhere. They cluster and thrive in places where the conversation and culture are the most stimulating. Where the Skills Are ; Tomorrow, the deadline for self-assessment tax filing, 20,000 HMRC staff are striking in call centres, protesting at the outsourcing of their jobs in trial areas, paying private employees £3,300 less Taxing wealth? The public mood still escapes the Tories ;
• · · HAVE YOU HEARD statements like this: Why don't they do something about it? I wish I wouldn't have to change? Why can't things be better? Why do salespeople suck? Why does operations screw up all the time? I wish we had better tools? We need a bigger budget? Why do the other guys have a better territory? ; PS on notice over social media use ; Internet preferred by engaging public ; The Australian Public Service Commission has updated its guide on the processes and requirements involved in terminating APS staff APSC updates guide on terminations
• · · · Groupthink or solitude which one offers the best work environment? The rise of the new groupthink ; integrity engagement and results should define public service professionals Preparing a commentary on a proposed PS Values Statement led Percy Allan to appreciate the importance of brevity and simplicity. Government work is god's work: ; The Government has warned federal bureaucrats against criticising politicians on Facebook and Twitter, saying ''unreasonable'' comments could result in disciplinary action. ; The internet has emerged as the preferred means of accessing Government services according to a study conducted by the Australian Government Information Management Office ; Once purely a Japanese phenomenon, 'karoshi' (death from overwork) is becoming an increasingly large issue for workplaces across Asia and even Australia Worked to death
• · · · · · Across the globe, drug trafficking and the organised crime behind it are placing increasing pressures on all legal and democratic systems. But countries emerging from conflict or violence are particularly susceptible to organised crime Trafficking is endangering the fragile democracies of this vulnerable region ; Tax crimes, especially those committed in connection with theft or other crimes, carry serious penalties - Nearly everyone recognizes that theft is a serious crime. However, many don't realize that most perpetrators also commit tax crimes when they fail to inform the federal government of their stolen profits. Tax Crimes Bring Incarceration and Financial Penalties; One of Britain's most high-profile football managers, Harry Redknapp, flew to Monaco to set up a secret offshore bank account named after his pet dog to receive bungs of nearly £200,000 and hide them from the taxman, a court heard yesterday How the dog with a Monaco bank account led police to Redknapp's secret 'bungs'
• · · · · · · UK Report: Serious Economic Crime Serious Economic Crime - A boardroom guide to prevention and compliance; THE Australian Tax office is pushing for more powers to investigate secret tax havens as well as increased penalties for offshore tax evasion New crackdown on offshore tax evasion ; The Vatican on Thursday threw its weight behind three international drives against drug trafficking, transnational organised crime and the funding of terrorism. First, the Holy See ratified the United Nations Convention Against the Illegal Trafficking of Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances, from December 1998, which it had already signed Holy See ratifies one Convention, joins two others

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Happy St Valentine Malchkeon

Wallace Stevens sold insurance, William Carlos Williams was a physician, T.S. Eliot was a banker, Jozef Imrich slaved in the NSW parliamentary library. If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made To hell with starving for your art

BYZANTINE SECTION NUMBERING
The Income Tax Assessment Acts (mainly ITAA 1936) and the Taxation Administration Act 1953 are replete with examples of what might be loosely called "creative" section numbering eg s 8AAZLE (treatment of payments etc and RBA surpluses), s 102AAZBA (Modified application of CGT - change of residence), s 159GZZZZG (Rebate election re tax-exempt infrastructure borrowings), etc.
In a December 2011 Federal Court decision ( DCT v Brilliant Homes Management Pty Ltd [2011] FCA 1539) involving the winding up of a company due to a running balance account (RBA) deficit debt (Part IIB of the Taxation Administration Act 1953 deals with RBA statements), Rares J lamented the use of convoluted section numbering as follows:
The unfortunate Byzantine modern tendency of Commonwealth Parliamentary drafters to include amendments to legislation that have a series of letters after them makes the explanation of these provisions more difficult and hard to comprehend. Re-enactment of legislation with appropriate renumbering of provisions such as s 8AAZJ would simplify the comprehensibility and explanation of legislation. The absurd use of such lettering was also found in the criminal cartel provisions in ss 44ZZRF and 47ZZRG of the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) that was misleadingly retitled, but not comprehensibly structured, as the Consumer and Competition Act 2010 (Cth). These are the central provisions that will have to be explained to juries, using two numbers and four letters, each time the section is mentioned in argument either to the judge or jury Mildly amusing
Czech Out House of Lords Debate on Tax Avoidance

We are the 99% How most Media Dragons and Their readers can navigate the blogosphere
A born freelance. John Leonard’s prose--breezy, pun-filled, playful--was never ponderous or self-important. No one wrote cultural journalism quite like him. If you consider a collection of John Leonard’s essays and reviews as a lifelong accounting, you will have a good idea of what went on of significance in the latter half of the American twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first. Though reviewing literary work was his calling, it did not box him in. He was a born freelance, going wherever that tenuous life led him, from the monuments of high culture that he was inspired to celebrate, to the commodities of the low, from which he would take gleanings where most of us would find none. It is difficult to understand how, with his immense reading and the sustenance his mind sought, he could have sat himself down year after year to examine the products of television. Yet there he was, considering what it meant when sitcom settings moved from the kitchen to the living room, and the family characters sitting on the living room couch, and presumably watching their television, seemed to be watching him.

Did not Eliot return to dead cultures, ancient languages, and the Legend of the Fisher King? Did not Yeats sustain himself on the Irish folklore? Did not Lawrence traipse across continents to Mexico, seeking the meaning of the Aztecs, the wisdom of primitive man?… Yours is a motel civilization…. Your art makes no sense and your music is too loud.”

• Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Reading John Leonard: A Tribute ; [The literary gatekeepers and fiction publishing. Marketing the boundaries: The fiction of Margo Lanagan; They’re a moral compass: testing our ethics, shaping our politics, spurring science, and piquing our curiosity... What’s the meaning of literary bmonsters? ; Social-science pugilist. The proudly politically incorrect Charles Murray is back, and he still can’t resist the urge to provoke. Cue the scholarly outrage Urge to provoke ; Orwell called them “disgusting tripe,” Camille Paglia considers them a “corrupt practice,” Stephen King winces at their “hyperbolic ecstasies” – Book blurbs have been a scandal since antiquity... I Greet You in the Middle of a Great Career: A Brief History of Blurbs ; Publishing with Double Dragon has been likened to marrying royalty—the honor is greater than the pleasure Double Dragon Publishing; ]
• · Books about poverty typically propose solutions or decry the problem. Katherine Boo is up to something else. She shows how poverty is lived She shows how poverty is lived: Poverty as Destiny ; His name is synonymous with brutality, and he had a penchant for rape and pillage, but is Attila the Hun unfairly maligned? flagellum Dei, the scourge of God Nice Things to Say About Attila the Hun
• · · The new censorship. Editors are no longer frightened of politicians but of Islamist violence, oligarchs, and CEO’s, says Nick Cohen. Ours is the age of bound and gagged journalism... Bound & Gagged; Vaclav Havel was keen to the limits of rationalism, and insistent that something stands above us, beyond our understanding. The Village Voice gives out theater awards called the Obies (for Off-Broadway), and during the 1980s the Voice’s theater department voted to bestow one of those prizes on the distinguished absurdist Václav Havel, who dwelled in the faraway absurdistan known as the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic... Democracy and the Human Heart
• · · · We all have many things to be grateful for and often we’re so busy in the chaos of daily life to take time and fully appreciate everything we have. For this reason gratitude is sometimes referred to as the Forgotten happiness ... ; The world is full of success stories – tales where the little guy takes a great idea and builds a thriving business, dominates an industry or takes over the world. But emulating such success is no easy task and can be daunting for even the most experienced person. So how do you become successful? Richard St John has eight secrets to share...
• · · · · The Penny Hoarder - Buying housing used to bestow multiple blessings, but their flow has now dried-up Housing fundamentalism fails
• · · · · · She was a flamboyant depressive; a woman who kept a revolver in the drawer and bullets in a tin of Pledge.” And you thought you had mommy issues Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Elderschadenfreude, explains Sandra Tsing Loh, is the secret pleasure of hearing about aging parents who are even more impossible than yours. Prepare to experience it Daddy Issues

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... the earth is full of thy riches.
So is this great and wide sea,
wherein are things creeping
innumerable, both small and
great beasts. Psalms 104: 24-25

It is the path of least resistance that makes rivers and men crooked Time Waits for No Man

A Few snowflakes, appropriately, fell around the parish church of Portsea yesterday in Hampshire as hundreds gathered inside to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of its most famous son, Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens turns 200 on Tuesday 7 February 2012. There's no sense singing “Happy Birthday” since he died in 1870 and the song was written decades after that Do we really need to make such a fuss about Karol?‎; A global Dickens appreciation, and a modest proposal - It's part of a marathon celebration of Charles Dickens's 200th birthday – the Global Dickens Read-a-thon Google on Dickens ; Charles Dickens was one of our finest ever writers and it is right and proper that so many people worldwide have been paying homage to the great man this week on his 200th anniversary Dickens would have loved being on Twitter; What is the connection between the great 19th century English novelist and the best-loved Czech literary anti-hero? The answer is, surprisingly enough, that without Dickens we quite possibly wouldn’t have Švejk at all. David Vaughan looks at this and some other Czech links with Dickens in this week’s Czech Books. Dickens and the Good Soldier Švejk ; Karol Dickens was long fascinated by Australia and there is a Charles Dickens statue at Centennial Park, Sydney – Down Under Great southern expectations Dickens based many of his characters on real people and Dickens at 200: still the best we've got on being poor Imrich Not - Like Cold River, Dickens was always a struggle

A Tale of A Decade Old Media Dragon in the Year of the Dragon - I don't want to die without scars Because the truth needs to be told … Everything is but a dream within a dream
Does time exist? Is our perception of the world different from its true reality? Is our concept of time fundamentally flawed? These are the central questions raised by KILLING TIME, a provocative documentary that explores the nature of time.

The film centers on the work of Julian Barbour, a prominent Theoretical Physicist, who gained notoriety with the publication of his landmark book, "The End of Time" (1999). In it, Barbour presents the concept of time as a human construct, not as a separately existing dimension. In a series of interviews, using nothing more than a Polaroid to snap random pictures, Barbour illustrates the development of his radical theory. He explains that physics has always been grounded in Sir Isaac Newton's conception of time as an invisible river that exists and flows independently of the objects in the world.
However, through his work with collaborator Bruno Bertotti, and his own attempts to reconcile the conflict between Quantum Mechanics and Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Barbour came to the conclusion that Newton was wrong. Barbour posits that time is, in fact, an illusion - a measure imposed on the world by humanity. He explains this with the concept of a 'now', which he describes as a snapshot in time - a completely frozen, self-contained instant (much like a Polaroid photograph). Time is simply the measure of the space between two separate and unrelated 'nows.'

• Well, like this river, time seems to flow endlessly from one moment to the next. KILLING TIME ; The truth is the light and light is the truth in the River Town To blog or not to blog …; [As early pioneers in the knowing, that when you lose your reason, you attain highest perfect knowing /Philosophy/ ; There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything. There’s Only Enough Room in the Blogosphere for the 144 Million of Us ; Top of the Blogs; Trends ; Social media has gone from being a pastime to a necessary component of any brand and business. Ten Media Dragons to follow in the year of the dragon ;]
• · Our home planet is about 4.5 billion (4,500 million) years old. how-it-works-amazing-answers-to-curious-questions ; The universe itself is expanding, but not in the way a balloon expands. The expansion is taking place throughout the universe, where space-time itself is being stretched outwards. Whereas a balloon pushes its edges out as it expands, the universe is also pushing its insides outwards as well, but there is no centre of the universe, so everything is moving away from everything else. It’s a bit like baking a ball of dough; the entire dough expands and grows, not just its edges. However, based on our knowledge of how old the universe is, roughly 14 billion years, we can observe a theoretical ‘edge’ of the visible universe about 14 billion light years away from us. howstuffworks.com It’s a bit like baking a ball of dough; the entire dough expand s and grows, not just its edges.
• · · I'm interested in bending the edges of the spectrum to make the abstract and the concrete hit one another more directly www.howitworksdaily.com ; The Frozen River, deals with the question, "Does time flow?" One of the key points in this chapter deals with special relativity. Observers moving relative to each other have different conceptions of what exists at a given moment, and hence they have different conceptions of reality. The conclusion is that time does not flow, as all things simultaneously exist at the same time The Frozen River; It is said that writers are people who, as children, did not receive sufficient rejection either from adults or peers and so are compelled to seek it relentlessly in later life. Dickens put Cold River on the literary map
• · · · True time would never be revealed by mere clocks--of this Newton was sure Time Waits for No Man; When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world, not even in infinite space. I was free--free to think, to express my thoughts--free to live my own ideal, free to live for myself and those I loved, free to use all my faculties, all my senses, free to spread imagination's wings, free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope, free to judge and determine for myself . . . I was free! Googopoly
• · · · · How does a newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? Is birth always a fall? Do angels have wings? Blog lets readers interact with characters from book: Fallen Lake; Dickens wrote about social issues that still resonate today ... Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water into a teapot, and it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash! Be water, my friend. Will Inequality Keep Getting Worse?
• · · · · · Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion. Newton, forgive me;" Einstein wrote in his Autobiographical Notes ; The general idea for Michelson Morley type experiments is that it is faster to swim a return journey across a flowing river than it takes to swim an equivalent distance upstream and back. If you do the maths it is quite easy to verify this. We have to substitute the swimmer for light and the river for the aether, and then build our testing apparatus accordingly. Invisible river that flows uniformly for ever irrespective of how fast the boat is being rowed the ripples from the oars will travel across the water with the same speed
• · · · · · From The Atlantic - 150th Anniversary Edition - The Duty to Think "On the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, we present this commemorative issue featuring Atlantic stories by Mark Twain, Henry James, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and many more." James Bennet editor of The Atlantic: "It is possible, in these pages, to enter into both the humanity of figures consecrated or condemned by history and the uncertainty the writers must have felt during the rush of events...It seemed to us that these Atlantic pieces have a way of conversing across the decades. And so in this issue, one finds Garry Wills’s account from 1992 of how Lincoln used the Gettysburg Address to reinterpret the Constitution and thereby “revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.” And then, equipped with that explication of how Lincoln purified the nation’s meaning, and with President Obama’s summation of what that meaning is, the reader can then encounter, with fresh appreciation, Lowell’s epitaph for Lincoln: New birth of our new soil, the first American The Duty to Think ; This year the media will gather in Berlin from March 6th 2012, on the eve of ITB Berlin, as the world’s leading travel trade show devotes the day entirely to the sector for the first time. Duty To Meet with Journalists

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It’s been said that a biographer is a novelist under oath. A life story cannot be told with facts alone. It must be marshaled to maximum literary effect... In the Footsteps of Giants

Congratulations to Andrew Tink for his book on Lord Sydney, providing us with a fascinating biography of the person for whom our great city of Sydney was named

The former Chairman of the NSW Public Accounts Committee, Shadow Attorney General and Shadow Leader of the House in New South Wales Parliament, Andrew Tink will next week introduce his latest book, Lord Sydney: The Life and Times of Tommy Townshend at Willoughby City Library’s Talks@Willoughby at 12.30pm, Thursday 2 February at Chatswood Library, Lower Ground, The Concourse, 409 Victoria Avenue, Chatswood. Note also the extract of the book entitled Gamble at the birth of a nation
Offering insight into the difficult political environment of late eighteenth-century Britain, Lord Sydney is a comprehensive biography of Thomas ‘Tommy’ Townshend. As Secretary of State for the Home Department, Lord Sydney was the minister responsible for recommending the adoption of a plan for a settlement in Australia and the man for whom the city of Sydney was named. Since his retirement from politics in 2006, Andrew has concentrated on two of his great passions – writing and history. His first political biography, William Charles Wentworth was awarded ‘The Nib’ CAL Waverley Award for Literature in 2010.

Bookings are essential for Talks@Willoughby, visit library website or phone 9777 7900

SYDNEY WITH A WHY OR AN EYE? Good Lord, there's a story in our city's namesake
HE gave his name to our city. Yet there is no official statue or memorial here to commemorate Lord Sydney, the British home secretary who was instrumental in transporting convicts to NSW.
''I don't think there should be,'' said Andrew Tink, the former state politician turned biographer. ''But the life of the man whose decision it was to order the European settlement of Australia is worth a book.
''There has been no biography of Sydney. And I'm finding it very hard to understand why I'm having so much trouble getting this one published.''

Our book of the month is Andrew Tink's fine new biography of Lord Sydney, promoter of the 1788 settlement of New South Wales and the man for whom our city was named. Andrew Tink spent nineteen years in the New South Wales Parliament, including eleven as a Shadow Minister and three as Shadow Leader of the House. Had he stayed on he would now be in government of course, but he chose to step down in 2007 to concentrate on his writing. He is a politician who can write; and he understands history better than most. Politicians ought to be good at history (otherwise, as we know, they will be condemned to repeat it) but not that many are, and we think none in recent times has dug quite as deeply as Andrew.

The man who gave Sydney its name risked his career in choosing the penal settlement's site and governor. But he was lucky and wise, writes Andrew Tink in this extract from his new biography.
• Risk assessment in the justice system isn’t new; Nation built on second chances [Andrew Tink. Epping, NSW 2121. Central Northern Sydney, Sydney Northern Suburbs. p: 02 9877 0266. http://www.andrewtink.com.au ; Lord Sydney: The Life and Times of Tommy Townshend ; Andrew Tink's paper on the naming of Sydney ]
• · Andrew Moore speaks with Andrew Tink, author of a biography of Lord Sydney, Thomas Townshend. Tue, 06 Dec 2011 09:45:00. 2GB archived ; History: Andrew’s Story
• · · The little known part Charles II had in the naming of Sydney. Australia’s most populous city derives its name from Algernon Sidney, a British politician executed in 1683 for treason, following the 1784 decision by his nephew Tommy Townshend, as Britain’s home secretary, to establish a penal colony in its distant territory. ;Andrew Tink, the former MP, fresh from his prizewinning William Charles Wentworth, decided to fill this gap. It was not easy. Most of Sydney’s personal papers are in the Clements Library in Michigan. The records of his role in dealing with George III’s madness are with the Royal College of Physicians in London. Yet when Tink had finished his manuscript, Australian publishers showed little interest. Peter Coleman on Sydney
• · · · It’s taken Andrew Tink 7 years to find a publisher but after the success of his award winning biography of the great explorer William Charles Wentworth Ascension Press have now published Lord Sydney, The Life and Times of Tommy Townshen.; When Lady Frances Sidney ran foul of Queen Elizabeth I, she adopted a family motto which the much-maligned organisers of Sydney's 2000 Olympics might well have copied: God preserve me from calumny! Lady Sidney was born in 1531, the daughter of Sir William Sidney of Penshurst, Kent and the aunt of the poet Sir Philip Sidney. In 1555 she became the second wife of Thomas Radcliffe, who in 1557 succeeded his father as Earl of Sussex. Like her husband, Lady Frances was a trusted courtier, serving as one of Queen Elizabeth's Ladies of the Bedchamber. After the Earl's death in 1583, Lady Frances incurred the Queen's displeasure, as a result of slanders about her treatment of her late husband, so she adopted the motto Dieu me garde de calomnie
• · · · · Premier O'Farrell (right) was accompanied by his colleague Andrew Tink—another veteran of that era-who left politics a few years back and has published a couple of very well received biographies on William Charles Wentworth and Lord Sydney since that time. It was terrific to see him in good fettle this week as he has suffered from ill health in recent times. In Uncharted Waters; What If …
• · · · · · Risk assessment in the justice system isn’t new - A statistics professor says he can predict crime before it occurs Drawing from criminal databases dating to the 1960s, Berk initially modeled the Philadelphia algorithm on more than 100,000 old cases, relying on three dozen predictors, including the perpetrator’s age, gender, neighborhood, and number of prior crimes. Misfortune Teller; Media Dragon predicted the birth of this book by Andrew on Lord Sydney back in 2006 Fortunate Teller