Lotus and Laurel brings together a wealth of essays in celebration of Paul John Frandsen, who has had a distinguished career as a scholar of ancient Egyptian language and religion. The contributors are friends, colleagues, or former students, and all are leading authorities in Egyptology. Evoking Frandsen's wide range of interests, they touch on a breadth of topics, including religious thought and representation; social questions of gender, kinship, and temple slavery; and studies of grammar and etymology. More than a tribute to this important scholar in Egyptology, Lotus and Laurel is a window onto some of the most important work going on now in the field.

In this well-illustrated book Professor Bernard Smith, who is often referred to as the father of art history in Australia, condenses the arguments presented in an earlier publication Modernisms History, 1998) into a very accessible and helpful text will prove useful for students and arts-interested readers. He begins by listing and carefully explaining those terms which frequently occur in arts literature dealing with the modern period and then goes on to show that modernism has become an historical period with its art forms both 'institutionalised' and 'globalised'. Now an historical entity, art historys basic tools can be employed to explain and describe it. They include an investigation of the periods 'style', use of 'form' and attitudes to meaning. In his defence of art historys traditions and methodologies he argues that the period that encompasses modernism in the arts might now be known as The Formalesque .