Inga Clendinnen writes about everything from the books that terrified her as a child to what history can teach us about ourselves and our own times. She describes visits to the beach and to a museum dedicated to the Holocaust. She recounts the experience of falling ill and the prospect of death. And she writes movingly about other people who have changed her own life.

Many of the themes which are central to Clendinnen's work are teased out in Agamemnon's Kiss- the question of black/white relations in Australia, the way we think about the Holocaust and its perpetrators, and the investigative power of history.

Clendinnen is not just a brilliant thinker. She writes brilliant sentences too, and in these essays her full mastery of language is everywhere evident.