It is gratifying to witness the renewal of interest in Elizabeth Harrower's fiction. Last year, In Certain Circles, Harrower's fifth novel, written in 1971, was finally published. Now, for the first time, a collection of her short fiction is available. Earlier versions of five of the twelve stories from A Few Days in the Country and Other Stories, were published during the 1960s and 1970s in Australian magazines and anthologies. Two stories, 'The Fun of the Fair' and 'The City at Night' are previously unpublished. Other entries have appeared this year in journals at home and abroad. The diverse publication history attests to the quality, power, and reach of Harrower's writing.

The writer is a conductor, opines the 'vaguely handsome, intensely laconic' cowpoke who speaks to Patti Smith as she lingers at 'the frame of a dream'. His words shape Smith's days. 'It's not so easy writing about nothing,' this companion tells her, and she scratches these words over and over onto a wall in her home with a chunk of red chalk.

Robert Adamson

Jennifer Maiden's The Fox Petition: New Poems (Giramondo) conjures foxes 'whose eyes were ghosts with pity' and foxes of language that transform the world's headlines into fierce yet darkly witty poetry. This is a book that takes corrupt law, peels away sentiment, and uncovers possible truths. It is a surprisingly fresh volume drawn from Maiden's obsessive themes – she is our great poet of humanity. In Sarah Holland-Batt's The Hazards (University of Queensland Press, reviewed in ABR, 10/15), from 'the promise of Berlin' to the 'mosquito net latitudes' there is style and fashion to relish, but under the skin of these poems we experience metaphors of the world's suffering. It is an exciting second book. Martin Harrison's posthumous Happiness (UWA Publishing, 12/15) is a triumph. Classical and romantic simultaneously, this is a book of love poetry and more by a philosopher of language, with 'a new vowelled, strict vocabulary drawn from air'. Harrison has enriched our world with this gift of a book.

Patrick Allington

Partly because of my interest in the high-level supporters of political leaders, but mostly because it is so well researched and written, I was fascinated by historian Sheila Fitzpatrick's On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (Melbourne University Press). In a solid year for Australian fiction, the novel that most endures for me – at this early stage – is Amanda Lohrey's subtle and funny A Short History of Richard Kline (Black Inc., 3/15), with a nod to A.S. Patrić's Black Rock White City (Transit Lounge). Amongst a strengthening field of Australian literary magazines (strengthening, at least, in terms of quality), I most enjoyed the illustrated short story magazine The Canary Press (edited by Robert Skinner). Issue 7 was symptomatic of the magazine's qualities, featuring writers living and dead, Australian and foreign – with Lally Katz's witty and disturbing script, 'The Apocalypse Bear – Part 1', a standout.

Since deposing Tony Abbott on 14 September 2015, Malcolm Turnbull has dominated Australian politics like a colossus. Turnbull's triumph, though long expected, happened quickly. The sense of national relief that followed was profound. The preceding eight years of Australian politics – scarcely the apotheosis of democratic governance – had produced intense public frustration. Turnbull's ascension brought hope for new leadership and a less divisive tone in Canberra.

Paddy Manning's timely biography, Born to Rule, tells the story of Turnbull's early life, career, and seemingly inexorable rise. Turnbull's mother left the family when Malcolm was nine, a devastating event that led to difficult years for Malcolm and his father, Bruce. At various stages in his political career, Turnbull has emphasised the family's modest means following his mother's departure, as an antidote to perceptions of immense private wealth and to suggest the basis for his oft-professed egalitarianism. Manning gently challenges this narrative; the Turnbulls' circumstances, he reveals, were hardly straitened. By the time Malcolm was in his twenties Bruce Turnbull's fortunes had improved substantially; when his father died in 1984, Malcolm received a multi-million dollar inheritance.

As a student at Sydney Grammar, traits of the adult Turnbull were already clearly visible. He was a star debater and actor. As head prefect, he was domineering and sometimes alienated his fellow students. Rob Hirst, Midnight Oil drummer and contemporary, observed that Malcolm at school was 'a plummy brew of eloquence, imperiousness and un-humble pie, plus a kind of sighing, saturnine resignation that his job necessarily involves being constantly surrounded by cretins'. It is a description some of Turnbull's parliamentary colleagues may recognise.

John Maynard Keynes has not lacked for biographers – about a dozen at last count. His first, his student Roy Harrod, established the framework of the public life, though providing only a sanitised version of the private Keynes. Donald Moggridge wrote the definitive account of the economic man, while Robert Skidelsky, with his three-volume work, John Maynard Keynes, published over a period of twenty years, has produced one of the great biographies of our time. In Universal Man, Richard Davenport-Hines is well aware of the challenge. Noting that Moggridge and Skidelsky between them have published 2748 pages of Keynesian biography with economics 'paramount', he argues that this approach while 'estimable ... is not right for every reader'. Even Skidelsky, in his recent single-volume biography, concedes that for some readers 'three volumes on Keynes is simply too much'. Universal Man is short, and concentrates on Keynes's life rather than Keynes the economic theorist.

The structure of the book derives from a characterisation of Keynes by Leonard Woolf as 'a don, a civil servant, a speculator, a businessman, a journalist, a writer, a farmer, a picture dealer, a statesman, a theatrical manager, a book collector, and half a dozen other things'. Davenport-Hines, more economical, depicts seven facets of Keynes: an exemplary figure, a youthful prodigy, a persuasive governmental official, an influential public man, a private sensualist, a connoisseur of the arts, an international statesman. The category 'economist' is avoided, thus enabling Davenport-Hines to rescue Keynes the individual from economics or more precisely from economic theory and economic jargon.

With economic theory at a discount and unconstrained by a strict chronology, the book has an enviable verve, vivacity, and wit. Davenport-Hines has a novelist's sense of character and writes memorable pen portraits. Keynes's fellow Cambridge Apostle, sexual partner, and rival in love, Lytton Strachey, 'demanded sincerity in others, [but] had a forte for self-deception'; Professor McTaggart was 'agoraphobic, and scuttled along streets with his backside to the wall like a crab scrabbling against the side of a bucket'; Leonard Woolf had 'the face of an anxious, ill-used basset-hound'. Thorough research has produced an illuminating collection of apposite quotes, much gossip, and a fund of anecdotes. The author also has a sharp eye for the ironies of history. We learn that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was peppered with shot by a careless French aristocrat at a hunt in Nottinghamshire eight months before he was assassinated at Sarajevo. And Keynes, interviewing a fellowship candidate in 1935, finds him 'excellent', with 'good fingernails' (Keynes was given to appraising manicures) and 'very nice'. Davenport-Hines informs us that the candidate's name was Turing.

'Happiness' may seem like an odd word for the title of a book of poetry, and given the circumstances of Martin Harrison's final years – his illness, the tragic death of his younger Tunisian lover, Nizar Bouheni – the title is rather ironic, but the poems in this posthumous volume are rich, bountiful, full of the same 'worshipful attention', the same sense of open contemplation and wonderment that characterised his previous volumes. Indeed, the sense of ecstasy that deep looking at the material world can bring seems even more heightened in these late poems. The dialogic investigations, not only with landscape and things of nature, but with ways of seeing and perceiving, are intensified, along with Harrison's recognition that the world stands before us in such plenitude that our immersion in its multifariousness can bring both intense joy and also a sense that we are totally incapable of holding such richness.

Harrison is so adept at active seeing and exploring how a sensual panorama is implicated in various abstract questions, usually to do with perception, value, aesthetics, memory, and how we negotiate the changing aspect of experience. The poem 'White-Tailed Deer' enacts this gloriously, the first two stanzas setting out a range of sensory detail constantly coming into being and dissolving: 'For a moment you understand / startled ecstasy – it's a squawky wattlebird landing / (no, that's a dream half-merged with a memory) / or it's the elbow jerk with which the car boot slams, / happenings which aren't noticed or which can't be, / how the shopping brought home brushes the passage wall, / how events change time's flow beneath perception. / Really, you've no idea what's going on. You hardly grab a thing.'

I was halfway through A Mother's Story when my oldest daughter asked how I would review it. 'Will you talk about the writing, mum, or the content?' she said. 'You could bring personal experience into it because you are a mother too. You'll read it differently from me.'

Lily is fourteen. She is rarely interested in the same books as me and she has never asked about my writing. In fact, she can be comically dismissive. Last year, when her class was studying short stories, I told her that I had published a few of them myself. Did she want to read one? 'Not really,' she said.

But Lily wants to read this highly emotional book. She has already skimmed the text and the timeline, four pages that begins in 2001 when Rosie 'falls pregnant' to Greg Anderson and ends on 12 February 2014 when Anderson 'attends Luke's cricket training at Tyabb oval and kills him'. Why is Lily drawn to it? Fame is one reason. Like many teenagers, Lily enjoys celebrities. Rosie Batty is undoubtedly a celebrity, but the cause of her fame is unusual: her valiant motherhood. Batty's only child was murdered fifty metres away from her, but she has not curled up and died. She has kept going, refused to shut up. She suffers, but she is not a victim. Batty is comforting and terrifying. She is protector and avenger. Her maternal love is gigantic, big enough to embrace 'all the abused women and children out there'. She has moral authority and dignity.

'This has been an eventful year for Christian Thielemann, the self-styled Dirigent-Überall of German conductors. After several seasons of speculation about his next career move, in June he lost out on becoming chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic but almost simultaneously landed the music directorship of the Bayreuth Festival. That post at the Wagnerian shrine in northern Bavaria had not officially existed since it was created briefly for Wilhelm Furtwängler following the death of Siegfried Wagner (son of the composer) in 1930, yet it was clear to observers that Thielemann had become increasingly close to the faction of the Wagner family in charge at Bayreuth and had been the conductorial power behind Katharina Wagner's throne for some years. He adds this summer job to his posts as chief conductor of the Dresden Staatskapelle and the artistic directorship of Herbert von Karajan's old Salzburg Easter Festival.

His book Mein Leben mit Wagner was originally published in German on the eve of the 2013 Wagner bicentenary, designed perhaps not only to cash in on those celebrations but also to consolidate his position as the darling of the German musical public in the then-already intensifying jobs race. This English translation is more up to date, including, as it does, mention of his 2015 Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth, and seems to have been based on the revised edition that appeared in Germany this summer.

With Ghost River, Tony Birch returns to a world he has delineated over many short stories and in his first novel, the Miles Franklin-shortlisted Blood (2011): the world of adolescents living on the margins. Invariably in trouble and in unstable family environments, the adolescents in Birch's fiction tend to find in their marginal status a degree of freedom. They use this freedom to explore what he has described elsewhere as 'landscapes of abandonment'.

The landscape of abandonment in Ghost River is one particularly close to his heart: Melbourne's Yarra River as it was in the late 1960s, winding through the working-class suburbs of Collingwood and Fitzroy, poisoned and largely ignored, and being further debased by new construction projects such as the South Eastern Freeway. Way past its prime as a site of leisure, and as yet untroubled by the busy bicycle paths that line it today, the Yarra at this time was the realm of the homeless and the odd local boy like Birch, or in Ghost River, local boys like Ren and his new best friend, Sonny.

1606 was a rough year for England. In late 1605 the Gunpowder plotters nearly blew up the government; a Catholic rebellion in Warwickshire sharpened the country's fear. England's ports were closed and an army raised; bonfires lit the streets of London and guards manned the city gates. Later, the Tower drew its bridge and loaded cannons upon the (false) report of King James's assassination. Through this, James, who had succeeded Elizabeth I three years earlier, sought to unify England and Scotland in the face of parliamentary resistance and hard-crusted xenophobia. Add demonic possession, witch-hunting, exhuming Elizabeth, a boozy state visit from Denmark, exorcism, and the plague, and you have quite a year.

William Shakespeare had a better 1606 than England. After a fallow period, he wrote three of his great tragedies: King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare biographers have a rum job: aside from the plays, documentary evidence of his life is thin. A good biographer has to be a sophisticated critic and historian, and dusty enough from archival work to deploy the scraps of evidence we have. James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia, is all of these. In 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, Shapiro continues the approach of his Samuel Johnson Prize-winning biography, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), studying a 'slice' of Shakespeare's life to illuminate his world and works.

The traveller, as V.S. Naipaul describes that role in A Turn in the South (1989), 'is a man defining himself against a foreign background'. Over the past forty years, Paul Theroux has built his career writing books, nearly fifty novels and travelogues, to become an exemplar of that definition. He seeks always to go farther and deeper, often journeying, to borrow one of his titles, to the ends of the earth. He has visited the far reaches of Asia (The Great Railway Bazaar, 1975), South America (The Old Patagonian Express, 1979), the Pacific (The Happy Isles of Oceania, 1992), and Africa (Dark Star Safari, 2002). In those places and others – also occasionally in his fiction – Theroux keeps a leading role for himself while the locales and their denizens support. His occasionally egocentric persona and often acute observations as an outsider in exotic lands have made him one of the most distinct voices in contemporary travel writing.

Theroux's journeys have typically pushed him beyond America's borders. In Deep South – a book that includes pedestrian photographs by the usually impressive Steve McCurry – the Northerner stays in his own country, venturing well beyond the Mason-Dixon line into South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Like Naipaul, who covered similar terrain in A Turn in the South, he ignores Louisiana. Early in Deep South, Theroux, the author of thirty novels and collections of short stories, writes, 'Fiction often highlights a landscape and suggests a future, but fiction can be misleading. A good reason to travel is to put fiction in context.'

This long-anticipated first volume of Robert Crawford's biography of T.S. Eliot, the first with permission from the Eliot estate to quote the poet's correspondence and unpublished work, highlights the Young Eliot as – not least in the achievement of his poetry – always an Old Eliot. And yet the picture of Eliot as a child and adolescent is detailed. In Young Eliot we get masses of information, much of it new, about Eliot's childhood in St Louis and his life and education at Harvard. Crawford describes a world teeming with potential influences, from the ragtime rhythms of downtown St Louis to the coastal landscapes of New England; from a curriculum crammed with Shakespeare and French to dancing lessons with the local jeunesse dorée.

Always with one eye on the poems, Crawford draws our attention to the creep of yellow fogs, to the annihilating storms of 1896 when the thunder spoke and devastation followed, and to young Tom's well-thumbed handbook of North American birds, where the song of the hermit-thrush is particularly praised.

Crawford offers many connections like this, but speculatively, without insistence. Refreshingly, he is less interested in hunting down the original of the hyacinth girl than in tracing in outline through incident and situation the shape of Eliot's poetic temperament.

A biography, then, of style.

In December, John decided there was nothing to lose and that he would write to Picasso asking him to view Nolan's work in storage. Sunday translated the letter into French, but even in draft form in English it read as sycophantic and sentimental ... They went to Picasso's apartment to hand deliver the letter and were met at the door by the artist's factotum. One wonders what Picasso made of it. There was no reply.

In one of the more insightful passages in Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan's biography Modern Love: The Lives of John and Sunday Reed, the couple are adrift and a little absurd in the wide world beyond Melbourne and their home of Heide, with its 'beguiling mythology' as 'the birthplace of Australian modernism'. Indeed, after the histories, biographies, and novels concerning Sunday Reed, her lover Sidney Nolan, and other principal protégés – Joy Hester and Albert Tucker, as well as the poets Max Harris and the fictional 'Ern Malley' – a study interrogating the making of that mythology would be timely. Heide in 1940s Melbourne was, after all, only one of multiple interconnecting creative and intellectual circles in which the artists were moving. But that is not Harding and Morgan's purview. For the most part, Modern Love returns us to the domestic interiors of Heide as creative fulcrum, taking us, as the title portends, one step further into the unorthodox marriage.

Ask any opera singer from the last fifty or more years who their favourite conductor is, and a substantial number would plumb for Charles Mackerras if they had enjoyed the privilege of working with him. There were always more flamboyant conductors – Karajan, Bernstein, Abbado, and others spring to mind – and certainly many enjoyed more immediate name recognition from the general public than Mackerras did. But there is no doubt that Mackerras was one of the greatest of all opera conductors, with an enormous repertoire aided by his longevity and unlimited capacity for hard work. While the range of Mackerras's musical activities was wide, ranging through oratorio and the great symphonic repertoire, it is fair to say that the bulk of his music-making was in opera, with his favourite work – if someone of his protean energy and lengthy career could have only one – Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro.

Editors Nigel Simeone and John Tyrrell have brought together a wide range of material, including interviews with many of the most important musicians of the last sixty years, in this very welcome and comprehensive book. They provide a detailed account of Mackerras's life and career, complemented by contributions from performers and scholars who had a close association with Mackerras, creating a multi-hued portrait of this great musician. The book is richly endowed with photographs and documents from the life and career, as well as a discography and a detailed list of performances.

The best short stories are like a glimpse into a room as you rush past in a train – the messy kitchen table, an empty handbag, the perfectly made bed – a snapshot with enough detail to suggest so much more.

In Six Bedrooms, Tegan Bennett Daylight takes us into the world of growing up, of desire and shame, and of repeatedly making mistakes. She knows exactly what to reveal, slipping the curtain open and closing it again at just the right moment.

The young women in these stories (one of them, Tasha, appears in several) are awkward, ashamed of their bodies. They regard the world with a 'strong, eager, possible look' that makes it hard for them to meet their own eyes in the mirror and for us to gaze on them as they stumble through adolescence. They do not belong and they know it, but nor can they quite lay claim to being misfits ('I called us misfits before. I wasn't quite a misfit. I didn't have the courage for that').

They are trying on emotions and personas as you would clothes, and the fit is often wrong. In 'Trouble', two sisters are living in a borrowed London flat. It is a hushed adult space in which they do not belong. For the youngest of these sisters, failure to inhabit this space with any ease mirrors her failure to inhabit her own experiences and desires, as she drifts through her life wishing she were someone else.

Amitav Ghosh has spent more than ten years writing the Ibis trilogy, his fictional account of the turbulent years leading to the First Opium War of 1839–42. Flood of Fire follows Sea of Poppies (2008) and River of Smoke (2011). It is unnecessary to have read the earlier books, though reuniting with some of the characters is enjoyable.

The novel begins with the grand spectacle of the East India Company Army on the march in remote Assam, 600 sepoys of the Bengal Native Infantry and 2,000 camp followers (who actually lead rather than follow). Havildar Kesri Singh, the senior Indian NCO, enjoys a good relationship with his battalion's adjutant, Captain Mee, whose bad temper he seems to understand. Mee is appointed to command a company of sepoy volunteers in an expeditionary force overseas, and Kesri will accompany him. Descriptions of the sepoys' existence provide a sharp contrast to British life in India. Caste is a concept always present in novels of this period, but its manifestation is almost more striking within the British community, civil and military.

Like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, Morrissey is among the relatively few figures in popular music deemed worthy of serious academic attention. Scholarly theses on Morrissey are common, dissecting the poetic cadence and social relevance of his remarkable song lyrics, from The Smiths' self-titled début album of 1984 to more recent solo albums. It is not surprising, therefore, that such a 'literary' musician, who bears the strong influence of Oscar Wilde in both his image and his lyrics, would have ambitions towards a novel – especially in the wake of his moderately well-received and decidedly florid Autobiography (2013), which he notoriously insisted be published as a Penguin Classic.

It is unfortunate and perhaps surprising, however, that he has produced something as preposterous as List of the Lost. Here is a novel (or novella) blighted by a disorienting, juvenile, and over-confident stream-of-consciousness style, combined with an inexplicable series of reckless personal rants covering the full spectrum of Morrissey's social causes, indelicately shoehorned between often cursory developments in a flimsy plot. The result is, paradoxically, both dizzying and boring.

Abacus is Prague-based Australian author and poet Louis Armand's seventh novel, his fifth in as many years. Such a prolific work rate is admirable, but in telling a story which covers the entirety of the twentieth century, as seen through the eyes of ten disparate yet loosely connected members of the same Australian dynasty, two hundred pages falls short of doing this epic narrative justice. What remains is a series of vignettes, some more compelling than others.

Thematically, the focus is on conflict and its effects on family, balanced nicely against the under-appreciation of art in Australian society. It is in its battle scenes where Abacus succeeds best. The two world wars and the Vietnam war are all covered. The second character – Sid Smith – has scenes in the trenches, which are as good as any of the multitudinous Australian portrayals of that era, and fifth character Georg Natschke has a realistic yet all too brief chapter set on a sinking U-boat.

In more than ten years on the scene, Sleepers has positioned itself as both champion of the small press sector – the natural home of the short story – and a canny player in the broader publishing landscape; its Almanac has been a reliable litmus test for the direction of new Australian writing.

In this instalment, several absurdist and satirical works are stacked into the collection's middle section, including the oddball 'Space Monkeys Drink Tang' by Eric Yoshiaki Dando, and Julie Koh's surreal first-person meditation on society's (and the narrator's mother's) relentless attacks on women's bodies in 'The Fat Girl in History'. It is a risky move – their particular brand of humour won't appeal to everyone.

The Wilkie family has farmed cattle at the edge of the desert for 130 years. When catastrophe strikes, three generations of men must wrestle with secrets from the past and the present. The decision whether or not to continue on a failing station becomes critical; definitive action no less testing.

The subtitle juxtaposes elegy and irony: though some characters retain a nostalgic attachment to Bundeena, the iconic Eurocentric pastoral is inadequate in this liminal space, with its parched land and faltering livestock. The emotional environment is also unsustainable: Wilkie men struggle to cry or to articulate their feelings; the novel's women are perceptive yet constrained.

Cloudless is the first verse novel from Christine Evans, a Australian playwright now resident in Washington, D.C., where she is a member of faculty at Georgetown University. Set in Perth in the 1980s, after 'the late seventies / when Bondy ruled the roost', but twenty years prior to the mining boom, Cloudless relates the story of eight characters whose lives intersect at Beatty Park, 'a chlorine palace filled with pools'. The disinfected paradise, paired throughout with the gleaming city, protects none of the characters against a variety of sullying effects, and worse.

Of the narratives running through the novel it is the story of Sally Jo, Jerome, and Auntie that is the most affecting. Auntie has '(c)ome down with the little fella on the bus', bringing Jerome from Geraldton to Perth in search of his mother, Sally Jo: 'It's hard being down here in the city / on a mission by herself / with Sally Jo's kid to look after / specially the way they look at blackfellas here / even an old lady with respect back home – / an Auntie.' The history of racism is present in that loaded word, 'mission'; Auntie has set herself an assignment (to find Sally Jo), but to achieve this end she has had to leave her community – her culture – to operate in a mangle of assimilation and trivialisation; the prevailing sense is of entrenched social disadvantage and individual tragedy.

Careful readers will soon notice something puzzling about this book, an attractive large-format paperback with frequent colour illustrations. Staring accusingly from the cover is the young indigenous actor Rowan McNamara, one of the stars of Warwick Thornton's 2009 love story Samson & Delilah. The image seems aptly chosen: Thornton's film is an acknowledged landmark in twenty-first-century Australian cinema. But strangely, while Samson & Delilah receives a handful of fleeting mentions in the book, nowhere in the space of 300-plus pages is it discussed in any detail.

Adding to the riddle, Samson & Delilah was given equally cursory treatment in the previous Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand, published in 2010 by two of the same editors. Both directories are part of an ambitious series from Britain's Intellect Books, which ranges across the whole of world cinema; each volume focuses on a particular country or region, assembling brief essays and reviews by multiple writers. The format is deliberately piecemeal and rather unsatisfactory, at least if you are looking for a text that will cover the ground in a systematic way.

WHICH POETS HAVE MOST INFLUENCED YOU?

Influence can be overt, deliberate imitation, or more subtle, an absorption one is hardly aware of. I deliberately imitated Dylan Thomas in my adolescence and learned, along with some bad habits, much about formal technique from him – as from Donne, Herbert, Milton, Keats, Yeats, Hardy, Auden, Larkin, Hecht. In the writing of blank verse there is a long line from (dare I say it?) Shakespeare to Wordsworth, Browning, Stevens, Frost. Among Australians, Shaw Neilson, Slessor, Hope, Wright, Harwood, Campbell, Peter Porter.

Australian poetry has always been influenced by international literary trends, especially avant-garde or experimental ones, from the French Symbolists to US 'Language Writing' from around 1970 to the present. A curious aspect of this has been a kind of hybrid poet who can straddle both 'experimental' and 'romantic' traditions. Given the increased popularity of experimental writing in Australia, it bodes well for a new generation of innovative writers. Avant-garde art is indisputably popular. Yoko Ono, for instance, recently staged the most popular exhibition ever at the MCA in Sydney. Avant-garde art is now being enjoyed by the mainstream population. Australian poetry, too, reflects this newfound acceptance of avant-garde potential; it is becoming more and more playful and experimental in its approach.

Robert Adamson is one poet who has worked in both experimental and romantic styles. The influence of Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley, who together with Charles Olson formed part of the second generation of 'Objectivist' poets in the United States, has always been apparent in the poetry of Robert Adamson. This remains the case in Adamson's new collection, Net Needle, a joint release with Flood Editions, which notably reprinted Ronald Johnson's experimental long poem ARK in 2014.

With her first book, Zoetrope, in 1995, MTC Cronin announced herself as a very particular force in Australian poetry. It was not just that her début was so much more immediately arresting than most poets' first outings, but also that it had real authority. This authority, coming from force of intellect and a kind of absolutist, almost inscribed imagination, has marked her work through the years, along with an appreciation for the enabling constraint and for critical rigour. Coming from a legal background through academia, she has arrived, with The Law of Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann, $29.95, 255 pp, 9781922186614) at an effortlessly monumental assemblage of poetic 'laws'.

The Law of Poetry by MTC Cronin (Puncher and Wattman)

Cronin hands down laws for every conceivable instance where poetry attempts to accommodate the world. 'The Law of Balance', for instance, says that 'In poetry, evening and twilight balance perfectly. / Mystery balances with any word you choose to weigh it against. / Poetry, however, puts the whole world out of whack. / When you read it you drift up or down / while everything goes in the opposite direction.' Elsewhere, there are more abstract formulations, or poems that summon up Brecht's 'Radio Poem' ('Little Law without redemption / Taking a loan to start a new civilization'), among other European ghosts, and generally refuse the great Australian incertitude. It is more an annotation of possible laws that we might adhere to if we knew them, than a corpus of law, and bears the same relation to law that Philip Salom's Alterworld bears to reality, with the same brio. This is poetry as cattle prod, and a welcome shock it is.

Dust without dimension

The November 13 attacks on ordinary citizens in Paris have outraged and galvanised the world community. We share this sense of revulsion. Australia has a large French population and a rich tradition of Francophilia. Our sympathies go to our French readers and to the families of all the victims.

Words, at such times, are de trop. Not La Marseillaise, though. Advances was struck by the guttural fervour with which it was sung by thousands of Melburnians at a memorial in Federation Square two days after the massacres. Poetry, too, is solacing. We looked for a poem that spoke to the universal despair that follows atrocities of this kind. Gwen Harwood's poem 'Memento Homo Quia Pulvis Es', first published in 1961, seemed apt. We reprint it here, with kind permission from her estate.

Those who are truly great

Michael Hofmann

Gwen Harwood died in 1995, aged seventy-five. Australia lost another major poet that year: Philip Hodgins (at thirty-six). Their work endures, of course (how could it not?). British poet Michael Hofmann – a contributor to 'Books of the Year' – welcomes the new George Braziller selection from Hodgins's poems: First Light. Earlier this year, speaking on a panel celebrating the poetry of Gwen Harwood at the Australia and New Zealand Festival of Literature and Arts, philosopher A.C. Grayling likened her achievement in poetry to that of Thomas Hardy and lamented the widespread unawareness of her work in his own country.

Yet we still don't have a biography of Harwood or Hodgins. Auden might have approved, but not the mass of Harwood and Hodgins lovers. So many outstanding writers go unexamined, or under-examined, in this country. That two such important writers – and intense personalities – should go unbiographised is a matter of regret. Luminous, informed biography is an important way of renewing (even retaining) interest in a poet's work. As Marina Benjamin said in her review of Matthew Spender's new memoir of his father, Stephen Spender, 'In getting to know Stephen the man, I am far more inclined to return to his poems' (New Statesman, 25 September 2015).

Gwen Harwood

Apropos of Gwen Harwood, it is known that opposition from within the family, after her death, circumvented the biography that Greg Kratzmann – ideally placed – was commissioned to write for Oxford (a project that Harwood supported). Keepers of the flame have entitlements, but they also have responsibilities. Let us hope that Ann-Marie Priest fares better with her proposed biography of Gwen Harwood.

Meanwhile, we can enjoy a slender volume from Ginninderra Press: Behind the Masks: Gwen Harwood Remembered by Her Friends ($20 pb), edited by Robyn Mathison and Robert Cox. Anecdotists include Alison Hoddinott and Stephen Edgar.

Harwood was perhaps the truest wit in Australian poetry. Her letters and postcards were famous too. Our Editor recalls one in which she described a Hobart jewellery store. A sign in the window had caught her sharp eye – 'Eternities reduced'.

Two new Fellowships

ABR has within a few years published more than a dozen long articles arising from the ABR Writers' Fellowships. Past Fellows have included Felicity Plunkett, Danielle Clode, and James McNamara. Fellowship articles are among the best-read features ever published in ABR. We hope to collect them in book form in coming years.

The Fellowship program continues to diversify, in more lucrative ways. Last month we announced the latest of our themed Fellowships – the Australian Book Review RAFT Fellowship for an article of 6,000 to 8,000 words on any aspect of the role and significance of religion in society and culture. Applications close on 31 January 2016.

We are now seeking applications for the third of our Australian Book Review Dahl Trust Fellowships. Once again we welcome applications for a substantial article on eucalypts. Applications close on 20 February 2016. The finished article will appear in our 2016 Environment issue.

Because of the generosity of the Religious Advancement Foundation Trust and the Bjarne K. Dahl Trust (with supplementary funds from ABR Patrons in the case of the latter Fellowship), these Fellowships are now worth $7,500. ABR Fellows, too, will benefit from the magazine's commitment to increasing payments to its writers.

As ever, we encourage prospective applications to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. before finalising their applications.

Poem of the Week

Kent MacCarter (photograph by Nicholas Walton-Healey)

Don't miss this new weekly online feature. Each Thursday an Australian poet introduces and reads a poem (some, but not all, of which have appeared in the magazine). Kent MacCarter began the series with a virtuosic performance (the only word for it). Coming up we have Eileen Chong, Kate Middleton, Stephen Edgar, and Judith Beveridge (who will read the winning poem in the 2015 Peter Porter Poetry Prize).

Look out for these and other features on the podcast. These recordings are available from our website, SoundCloud, and iTunes.

Support from Arts NSW

ABR is delighted to announce that it has received an Annual Program grant from Arts NSW to support payments to New South Wales writers in 2016. This will enable us to continue expanding New South Wales content in ABR. We will publish more features from and about the state. Look out for New South Wales contributions to our podcasts and Arts Update. And we will continue to increase our rates.

Transnational Literature

The November 2015 issue of Flinders University's e-journal Transnational Literature is out now. It includes new poetry from Stuart Barnes, Mark O'Flynn, and Billy Marshall Stone-king, among others, and seven pieces of prose creative writing, ranging from 'a Kafka-infused story set in Japan to a passionate defence of freedom of choice in modes of dress'. It also features tributes to poet and academic Syd Harrex, and the text of Brian Matthews's 2014 Brian Medlin Memorial Lecture 'The Preciousness of Everything'.

Letters from the Master

HenryJames (photographer unknown, via Wikimedia Commons)

Confirmed Jacobites, of whom there is at least one lurking in Studio 2 at Boyd, can't get enough of the Master, so they will pounce on The Complete Letters of Henry James 1878–1880, Volume I (in fact the eighth volume to date in the Nebraska series). Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias, the editors, inform us there will be 132 more volumes in the series.

Henry James was thirty-five in 1878. Famously and prodigiously, he accepted 107 dinner-party invitations during the winter of 1878–79. Contemporary novelists should get out more.

The Suburban Review

This newish Melbourne periodical, based in Melbourne and edited by T.J. Robinson, has reached its sixth volume (as each issue is called), so it is surely guaranteed a long life. Highlights include fiction by writers such as Harriet McKnight (shortlisted for the 2015 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize) and poetry by Toby Fitch (new Poetry Editor of Overland, and shortlisted for the 2015 Peter Porter Poetry Prize). Each issue costs $14.95.

Pratchett largesse

Terry Pratchett

In late September the University of South Australia announced the creation of a biennial $100,000 Terry Pratchett Memorial Scholarship, funded by a $1 million endowment made to the University by the best-selling UK author. 'Terry was someone who was never shy of contributing to the things he believed in and as recipients of this wonderful bequest we are reminded of his commitment to inquiry and to learning,' said Vice Chancellor, Professor David Lloyd.

Pratchett, who died earlier this year, was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University in 2014. He was best-known as the author of the Discworld series which began in 1983 and ended forty-two books later with The Shepherd's Crown, which was published posthumously in August.

Arts Update e-bulletin

Have you signed up yet for our free fortnightly e-bulletin devoted to Arts Update? It comprises all our arts reviews published online during the previous fortnight, plus news items and some juicy giveaways, including double passes to film, plays, operas, and concerts.

Give a free gift subscription

There is still time to introduce a friend or relation to Australian Book Review. Until 31 December, new and renewing subscribers can direct a free six-month subscription to ABR. You can qualify for this special offer by renewing your current subscription even before it is due to lapse. Fill in the back of the flysheet that accompanies the print issue, or ring us on (03) 9699 8822. Terms and conditions apply.

Farewell to 2015

This has been a watershed year for the magazine. Never before have its programs been more diverse or ambitious. New features were added to the magazine, and we consolidated our arts coverage through Arts Update. We published a total of 303 writers in our ten issues and Arts Update – a record number. Of them, fifty-nine per cent had not appeared in 2014; and almost 100 of them were entirely new to the magazine – two clear measures of ABR's commitment to inclusiveness and new talent.

In May we launched a campaign to increase our payments to contributors. The result from donors and readers has been truly heartening. Large numbers of readers share our belief that critics deserve support and reasonable payment – not just a byline. Support from our growing cohort of Patrons has been extraordinary. Cultural philanthropy has transformed this magazine, and the 2015 result exceeded previous years. Happily, our base rate for reviewers has doubled in the past two years.

Now we look forward to another year of great publishing and innovative programs. These will include States of Poetry, podcasts, a series of professional workshops, and our first cultural tour (to the United States, in September).

As always, we thank our writers, subscribers, Patrons, donors, advertisers, and partners for their continuing support. Flinders University has sponsored the magazine since 2005, and we thank all our colleagues and contributors there.

Have a great summer! Ed.

There is something pleasurable about a good American history book. I recall reading David Hackett Fischer's Paul Revere's Ride (1994) on a train journey from Boston to Washington. I read it not because I was teaching about Paul Revere, but because it was a fine work, true to a tradition in which, as Fischer put it, books 'are a sequence of stories, with highly articulated actors'. These stories are grounded in archival research, which makes them credible. Although they make a scholarly argument, they are written to be accessible to a wide audience. Writing in impenetrable jargon and deferring to French theorists, so fashionable in literary criticism, never took hold in American history departments.

Edward E. Baptist writes in the American tradition, albeit without the sense of humour displayed by many great historians. He prefers to write with a touch of anger, eager to expose the role the slaves who toiled on cotton plantations played in driving America's economic growth. Nevertheless, his book is based on meticulous primary research, and he tells his American story through a series of smaller ones, each of which takes the reader back to antebellum America. These stories are based on 'thousands of personal narratives', memoirs, and 2,300 interviews conducted by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. They come together in a way that makes it hard to disagree that American capitalism, and indeed the American nation, is tainted by its association with slavery.

We all instinctively know that slavery is wrong, but in keeping with the book's economic focus, Baptist emphasises its brutality as a labour system, where output was maximised using intimidation and punishment, or, as he prefers, 'torture'. To drive this point home he refers to the slave system by the shorthand term 'the whipping machine'. It is richly evocative language, the more so because the term derives from one of Baptist's stories.

In 1922 John Reith was appointed general manager of the British Broadcasting Company. Reith was the son of a Glasgow Free Presbyterian Minister. Trained not at university but as an engineer and badly wounded during World War I, Reith was a virtual unknown, with no media experience. By his own admission he didn't even know what broadcasting was, but that was no problem: nobody else knew what it was either. He was always confident that he would somehow come to do great things. He was right. The choice turned out to be a triumph. Over the next sixteen years, Reith was to develop and deliver one of the world's great ideas, public broadcasting, in the form of what became the BBC.

This New Noise was originally commissioned by the Guardian as a series of long essays on the BBC. The paper commissioned its chief culture writer, Charlotte Higgins, 'to try to deepen the debate about the BBC which had been shrill and bad-tempered'. This was another boon for the BBC: Higgins, too, was an inspired choice. She has achieved what the BBC has done every day for almost ninety years: enriched public discussion. Now the essays have become a book.

At almost 300 pages of very entertaining reading, This New Noise covers many of the decisive moments in the BBC's history, introduces many of the key players, and consistently hints at the immense changes which public broadcasting faces in the rapidly evolving world of digital media. Almost all of these mirror the experience of the ABC: unsurprising, since the ABC was founded on the same principles that Reith and his early colleagues devised. That is why this book is so important to Australia: it provides invaluable background for policy-making on the challenges that are radically altering the role or presence of public broadcasting in this country.

Consider the following dilemma. If it is possible to identify the cause of a person's action and beliefs – causes that are outside the agent's own conscious reasoning – in what sense can we say that the person chooses what she does or she thinks? If the person did not consciously choose, then it is reasonable to ask whether she should be held morally responsible for any of the subsequent consequences of her actions. This is the general territory of the puzzle that Neil Levy's thoughtful and elegantly written new book addresses. He explores what scientific advances in the study of consciousness might tell us about our capacity for choice and, hence, our responsibility for those choices.

In recent times, cognitive scientists have in fact shown ways in which a great deal of our decision-making is driven by factors of which we are unaware. For instance, our judgements of the 'social proximity' of others will differ depending on whether we have a cold or hot drink in our hands: the warmer cup makes for more positive assessments of our relationship with other people. Perhaps of greater concern are Implicit Association Tests that show that even those with explicit non-discriminatory ideals will often more quickly associate a woman with a family than with a career or a black face with criminality. Here, the underlying attitudes are often diametrically opposed to the sincerely held explicit beliefs and attitudes of experimental subjects. There is a large amount of such experimental evidence, all of which undermines the thought that our morally significant choices are always consciously determined.

Outwardly safe, aristocratic, and uncontroversial, the English country house seems suitably benign coffee-table material to leaf through on a drowsy Sunday afternoon. However, while the story of the English country house is certainly steeped in nostalgia and privilege, it is also a narrative of exclusion, exploitation, and decline. Geoffrey G. Hiller engages with each of these manifestations in his latest book The English Country House in Literature, an anthology of extracts on the subject of the English country house spanning four hundred years. Hiller's selection, framed by literary renderings of country houses by Sir Philip Sidney and Sarah Waters, inspire the modern reader to journey behind the mythology that many take to be the truth of these institutions.

After the Dissolution of the Monasteries between 1536 and 1541, grand buildings and gardens were no longer the sole domain of religious communities. Not only were monastic lands appropriated by the crown and sold to court favourites, but syndicates of London merchants entered into land speculation. In some cases, newly wealthy men acquired vast amounts of land, sometimes procured chiefly as a means of generating income. Consequently, rack-renting and enclosure became a source of distress for many tenant farmers.

The country houses that grew up in the wake of the Dissolution often embodied architectural elements that reflected the growing absolutism of their owners' claims upon the world. In light of this emergent power, the introduction of Hiller's anthology contextualises why the notion of the good man, the stable, immutable estate, and the modest architectural form became coveted ideals during the Renaissance.

'Let us now praise famous men / ... men renowned for their power ... / Leaders of the people by their counsels ... wise and eloquent / ... Rich men furnished with ability, living peaceably in their habitations ...'

These aspirations, from Apocrypha: Sirach 44, pose some problems for a biographer. The famous, the powerful, the leaders, the wise and eloquent, the rich and able would all seem to be among the proper and the more obvious and manageable subjects of biography. But this is, of course, a delusion. Success and wealth breed ego, and egos often crave cosseting and recognition. With the best will in the world, biographers praising 'famous men' are haunted by the spectre of hagiography.

In Frank Lowy: A Second Life, Jill Margo has certainly faced this challenge. Frank Lowy is unquestionably famous, rich, has been an outstanding leader in several spheres of endeavour, has often been a wise counsellor, and, without being egotistical, has a sturdy faith in his own abilities, influence, and presence.

Had it not been for the leadership of Winston Churchill in 1940, Nazi Germany would in all probability have won World War II. The most enthusiastic revisionist historian would grudgingly accept this proposition.

As this highly readable account by London Mayor Boris Johnson shows, 1940 was the high point of a career that extended from the 1890s to the 1960s. In politics Churchill was twice prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer. As a soldier he was shot at on four continents. He published more words than Shakespeare and Dickens combined, and he won the Nobel Prize for literature. On the personal side he was a devoted husband, an artist, and an amateur bricklayer. His way of life was not exactly healthy: ten cigars a day, whisky and soda before breakfast, half a pint of Pol Roger, white wine, claret, late brandies, even during World War II.

Some aspects of Churchill's career are not so well known, and these are given due prominence by Johnson. He argues that, along with David Lloyd George, Churchill can fairly be described as a co-founder of the welfare state. He began in 1908 with a Trades Board Bill which set legally enforceable minimum wages for certain jobs, particularly the mainly female low-paid garment workers in London's East End, Leeds, and Manchester. To combat unemployment, Churchill set up the first Labour Exchanges. Together with Lloyd George, he fought the Great Budget War of 1909 and 1910, a successful attack on inequality and, as Johnson puts it, 'it was seen, inevitably, as an attack on the dukes and the very landed class from which Churchill emerged'.

'It is hard to imagine a more challenging scholarly task than composing, in under three hundred pages, an introduction to a field as vast and variegated as French literature. From the fabliaux, mystery plays and chansons de geste of medieval times to such figures as the present-day Nobel Prize-winning novelists Le Clézio and Modiano, it embraces nine hundred years of textual production. It is a veritable universe, occupied by many thousands of imagined worlds, and still growing.

This is easily the most ambitious project that Cambridge University Press has to date undertaken in its 'introductions' series, where the great majority of titles deal with single authors or limited themes. At first glance, one might wonder about the need for such a volume, but it is a sad fact that in the Anglophone world, including universities, interest in French literature has been declining for the past fifty years or more. It is therefore to Brian Nelson's credit that, guided as he says 'by personal preference and taste', he takes his readers on a bold and informative tour of some of the brightest stars in the French literature galaxy.

Opening with the colourful fifteenth-century figure of François Villon, Nelson offers twenty-nine short essays on individual authors. He does not attempt a continuous historical survey, but does follow a chronological line, ending on a longish chapter which sketches prominent features of the period from the 1950s to the present. Along the way, we meet several of the giants who have contributed to France's standing as one of the great literary cultures of modern history: the likes of Montaigne and Rabelais, Molière, Voltaire, Rousseau, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Proust and Céline, Sartre and Camus.

Arrival is the first volume in a new series of literary anthologies comprising previously unpublished fiction, non-fiction, and poetry edited by John Freeman, former editor of UK-based Granta. The book begins with a boring and self-indulgent introduction about the choice of theme: Arrival. Freeman explains that after experiencing serious turbulence on a flight to Syracuse, he 'never forgot how exhilarating it was to be welcomed back into gravity's gentler embrace'. He continues, 'Every time I read I look to re-create the feeling of arriving that day.'

Fortunately, the authors interpret this theme loosely and focus largely on the theme of returning to a time or place – a kind of 're-arrival' – that allows for the composition of haunting and uncanny works. What Freeman lacks in his introduction, he makes up in his ability to draw a stellar cast of writers. These include Dave Eggers, Lydia Davis, Haruki Murakami, and Anne Carson. The anthology begins with 'Six Shorts', a suite of untitled transnational autobiographies. Despite each piece ending with the author's name, the effect is of one long collaborative piece. It is the standout feature of the anthology; a brilliant form I hope more anthologies will adopt.

Writing about masculinity is difficult. But Paul Dalgarno, a founding editor at The Conversation, accepted the challenge. In And You May Find Yourself, he expresses truths which never seem trite or indulged.

The book describes the author's relationship with his father, as well as the flaky bond he shares with his wife and sons. These anxieties are set against Dalgarno's relocation from Scotland to Melbourne. Dalgarno writes with hostility and anger, but the prose is often tender, and always candid. He pokes fun at male stereotypes: at school in Scotland Dalgarno formed a gang, notable for glue-sniffing, aggression, and the group-think of its members. But each boy must have been hiding something, as Dalgarno certainly was: he narrates his progress to the soundtrack of West Side Story.

Kate Howarth is the child of a single mother, father uncertain, brought up by her Aboriginal grandmother. She in turn becomes pregnant at sixteen. Determined to keep her son despite the pressure to give him up for adoption, she marries the father. The marriage doesn't go well and Kate leaves without her son, hoping to come back for him when she is settled, but things don't go as planned and she doesn't see him again for fourteen years. She goes on to build a successful career in the personnel industry by dint of intelligence and persistence, marries the boss, and builds up their firm to one of the country's most successful recruitment companies. This marriage is another loveless one, though, and she eventually 'pulls the plug'. A third marriage to an American met via internet dating is a fiasco when he turns out to be a penniless transvestite.

'BATSHIT BORING BOOKS'

Tim Colebatch's review of my book Catch and Kill: The Politics of Power (November 2015) quotes a comment I made to The Age about not wanting to write 'one of those batshit boring books' about politics. For the record, I was not referring to his biography of Rupert Hamer, which I read and admired. The batshit boring books shall remain nameless. As shall their publisher.

WHY DO YOU WRITE?

Maybe because I can't dance. Maybe because writing involves the Puritan's requisites of pain, frustration, self-loathing, and (guilty) satisfaction.

ARE YOU A VIVID DREAMER?

For sure, my dreams seem to be much more vivid than I am – as far as I can recall.

WHERE ARE YOU HAPPIEST?

In a library; in a book; on a train; at a (horse) race-track.