'Throughout his career as a writer and a critic, Laurie Clancy was also a teacher. He put as much thought and energy into this as he did into his other responsibilities, and is remembered fondly by his students from La Trobe University, where he lectured in English and Australian Literature, and RMIT, where he taught creative writing in the TAFE Division. These memoirs give a glimpse of him in the classroom, and acknowledge the lasting effects of his work. —John McLaren.' (Introduction)

'Laurie Clancy is very much a writer of the modern secular city. Although he was brought up in a Catholic household, he had left the Church well before he left school. The world he describes in his fiction is a post-modern world, where there is no God to offer comfort or authority to offer meaning. Clancy approaches this world from a realist perspective, but his realism breaks down as his characters find their efforts to make sense or to find fulfilment break down into fragmentary episodes of frustration or futility. Indeed he published many of these individual scenes as separate short stories. Even in the novels the narratives tend to collapse into series of fragments, rather than follow any kind of progression towards unity. These fragments record the frustrated attempts of his characters to create a unity in their experience, or to bend the outer world to their desires. Their constant failures produce an absurdity that ranges from the farcical to the tragic. ' (Author's introduction)

'Melbourne is two cities. There is the city of space and place, of streets and parks and buildings where we live. Then there is the imagined, inspirational city that holds the memories of the lives its people have led. '

'In memoir and autobiography, diaries and journalism, fiction and poetry, many writers have shared their perceptions of Melbourne. John McLaren shows how this past lives on beneath today's city, taking us back to the boats that filled its harbour, the rivers that run beneath its streets and the ghosts who dance in its market. His book offers new prospects of reading, new ways of seeing the city within the city.' (Source: back cover)

'Bernard Hickey was a man of many loves. He loved the friends he made around the world. He loved Trinity College, Dublin, where he first studied abroad. He loved his ancestral source land of Ireland, and the many friends he made there. He loved his native Australia' and his adopted home in Italy. Through his career in Venice, and then in Lecce, he tirelessly promoted the study of Australian literature, not only in Italy, but throughout Europe. Yet he wa no uncritical patriot. As an outsider, he was an engaged observer of life and events in Ireland and Italy, but throughout his life he remained proud to be an Australian.' (p 195)

'I envy artists who excrete a style as a tree gives out gum resin, as something natural to them...For me, the style is existential, expressive and problematic...I am not a canonical person, and find orthodox formularies hard to remember, let alone 'believe in'.

For forty years, Vincent Buckley (1925-1988) was a central figure in Melbourne's literary, political and religious life. A major poet, he was also a leading literary critic, a regular book reviewer and a formidable controversialist. Themes in his work include the nature of God, religious and political responsibility and the place of poetry in a modern society. This is the first biography of Vincent Buckley. (Publisher's Blurb)