The Godfather: Peter Corris on Hemingway
Lately I’ve had Ernest Hemingway coming at me from all directions. For the second time I watched Woody Allen’s brilliant romantic comedy Midnight in Paris, in which a Hollywood hack writer fantasises that he’s back in the Paris of the 1920s. The look-alike actor...The Godfather: Peter Corris on golf
A number of creative people have played golf. British Poet Laureate John Betjeman did and wrote a poem about it, the first line of which reads: ‘How straight it flew, how long it flew’. Betjeman, it is said, was more interested in how far he could hit the...The Godfather: Peter Corris on those long sleepless nights
For more than 69 years I never had any trouble sleeping. As a kid I was very active, riding a bike to and from school and playing back-yard and street cricket and football after school until darkness fell. Later I pounded a tennis ball against the back wall of the...The Godfather: Peter Corris on all his houses
Jean Bedford and I have owned ten houses together – one in Melbourne, three in Sydney, several in the Illawarra. We had a kit house built for us on Coochiemudlo Island in Queensland and later bought a house in Byron Bay. We have rented ten others – in all the...The Godfather: Peter Corris on the pleasures of biography
When, some years ago, I ruthlessly culled my library down from several thousand books to a few hundred, a surprising number of biographies made the cut. My principle of selection was, ‘Will I ever need to read or refer to this book again or do I have a particular...The Godfather: Peter Corris remembers friend and co-writer Roger Keesing
I’ve worked as a writer with some justly well-known and extraordinary people, like ophthalmologist Fred Hollows, feisty euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke and larrikin actor Bill Hunter. Much less well-known but equally extraordinary was anthropologist Roger...The Godfather: Peter Corris on three historical events he’d have liked to see
I used to entertain myself and (less so, I suspect) my friends by posing the question, ‘What three events in history would you wish to have been a witness to?’ I had a theory that the answers would provide a clue not only to their real interests but to the kinds of...The Godfather: Peter Corris on trivia nights
Jean and I recently attended a trivia night – a fundraiser for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. There were about 300 participants, many of them book people, giving us a chance to catch up with the likes of head of the Australian Booksellers Association and fellow...The Godfather: Peter Corris on talking books
I wonder if there are any authors who listen to their own work when it appears in the form of a talking book? Possibly the real egoists do. About twenty of my books have had the treatment, mostly Cliff Hardys, but at least one each in the Crawley and the Browning...Peter Corris nominates his best books of 2012
The NRB editors have invited me to nominate the best books I’ve read in 2012. As I explained in a Godfather column earlier this year (NRB 31 June), I keep a list of books I’ve read, with a brief assessment, and I assign each book a mark out of ten. This makes it...The Godfather: Peter Corris on discovering Maugham (and others)
In an idle moment, of which I have many these days, I found myself trying to remember who had introduced me to certain books and writers. I was unsurprised to find how many I’d forgotten, but surprised to find how many I could remember. My sister introduced me to...
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