Thomas Keneally leads with a meandering dissertation on national identity that may demand multiple readings for those wanting to pin down the gist of his argument. Maria Tumarkin’s piece on the recent misdemeanours of historian Orlando Figes should be required reading for anyone with pretentions to writerly fame. The mere inclusion of a Les Murray essay – always engaging, at times irritating – diminishes the Quadrant crowd’s repeated claims of a supposedly myopic, left-dominated literary culture in Australia. Richard Flanagan’s idea that a writer’s politics are ‘matters between a man and a soul’ sits uncomfortably alongside Mel Campbell’s outing of V.S. Naipaul as a thoroughgoing misogynist. Brad Nguyen takes theorising to unnecessary lengths in using Žižek and Guattari to help justify the phenomenon of Justin Bieber, ignoring the fact that one can be ‘open to the new’ without swallowing whole those select versions propagated by the mass media. Peter Boyle’s poem ‘Green Island, Taiwan’ and Mark Mordue’s story ‘Crossing Over’ stand out in their respective genres. Best of all is Guy Rundle’s uproarious take on the pornography debate, informed by his former job in the fabulously named Lovecraft adult store in London (‘windowless, cavernous … it was like being on the inside of a giant vagina’).

To end with, a personal disappointment: I have been meaning to read former Labor minister Lindsay Tanner’s book Sideshow for some time. After learning here of his predilection for awfully conservative (not to mention plain awful) rock music, I may have other priorities.