Sometimes I think my whole life has been one long search for beauty. I am Australian and as such I should be embarrassed to write a line like that, in a land where one must speak of beauty in whispers.'

Susan Johnson writes of where her search for beauty has taken her, how 'beauty enters the body like desire', and how beauty is nothing less than 'life's call to order, life's bid to save it from itself'.

MUP's Little Books on Big Themes series pairs Australia's leading thinkers and cultural figures with some of the big themes in life.