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This extended review compares two approaches to the biography of the art historian Ursula Hoff (1909-2005); Sheridan Palmer’s Centre of the Periphery. Three European Art Historians in Melbourne. Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009 and Colin Holden’s The Outsider: A Portrait of Ursula Hoff. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009. Palmer’s approach outlines a view of post-WW II cultural progress and the ways in which émigré culture contributed to the remaking of Australian social and cultural horizons. This can be contrasted with Holden’s, which makes Hoff’s outsider status as part Jewish and as migrant the very title of his book. The review suggests certain parallels that can drawn between the attitudes and frustrations of Hoff and the novelist Patrick White, the latter a homosexual ‘returned’ émigré. Hoff’s subject position and her distaste for a complacent and snobbish Australian cultural establishment echo White’s contemporaneous views in the 1950s-1970s. Certain approaches to the writing of cultural history, biography and ficto-criticism are highlighted, in order to emphasise the complex work performed by the cultural historian.