The long subtitle of this biography says it all. Hill was an immensely popular and influential travel writer in the 1930s and 1940s. Her books The Great Australian Loneliness (1937) and The Territory (1951) gathered together and built on the many stories she had written for city newspapers. She also published histories of the flying doctor medical service (Flying Doctor Calling, 1947) and of the dried fruit industry along the Murray River (Water into Gold, 1937). Her novel based on the life of Matthew Flinders, My Love Must Wait (1941), sold more than 100,000 copies, a record at the time for an Australian-authored book published in Australia.

I first encountered the work of Philip Salom in the pages of The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991). Anthologies, of course, have their limitations, but they can be a great place to meet people. Salom's first poem in that book, 'Walking at Night', includes an image of the urban sky: 'Streetlights glow overhead / Like the teeth of a huge zipper; the universe / steals in when the zipper's open.' Here was a poet who wanted to look everywhere all at once. Streetlights are hardly stars, and zippers are often best left closed. But in this case, contemporary dross becomes a gateway to a sense of something beyond, a metaphysical space you only reach by laughter.

I first encountered Sheila Fitzpatrick's work in the mid-1990s. The 1986–87 controversy in The Russian Review about how to write a social history of Stalinism was taught as a milestone in the historiography of my field. Instinctively, I took sides against my professors and with Fitzpatrick's call to remove the state from the centre of analysis, a methodological tactic informing much of what I have written since. Soon I became her student, first still at the University of  Tübingen, where she was a visiting professor, then in the doctoral program of the University of Chicago. In the past three years, since Fitzpatrick's return to her native Australia, we have become collaborators on a joint research project. My endorsement adorns the dust jacket of On Stalin's Team's Australian edition.

This latest of Fitzpatrick's many books focuses on the dozen or so men who, at any given point in time, formed the dictator's closest collaborators. Some of them changed over the years, but a core was stable from the factional fights in the 1920s to beyond Stalin's death in 1953. This was a team of hard men. They respected Stalin as leader partially because he was tougher and more ruthless than they. This 'tricky bastard' was no weak dictator dependent on the loyalty of his underlings, however. When push came to shove, Stalin always had the last word; he had the power to define who was in the team, and who was not; and from the Great Terror onwards, Stalin also held power over life and death. A perverse kind of a team player, he craftily exploited this threat to rule his subordinates.

In the early 1990s, after Leo Schofield was – not without controversy – appointed the artistic director of the Melbourne Festival, Clive James referred to our own emerging cultural tsar as 'Australia's Diaghilev'. Which, I guess, retrospectively makes Sergei Pavlovich Russia's Schofield.

There is an element of truth in James's witticism, especially these days when one considers the artistic and geographical diversity of Leo Schofield's festive reign. Although Diaghilev didn't live beyond fifty-seven, Schofield is still going strong at eighty, his stamina and quicksilver mind unimpeded by age. Another Jamesian tribute, from his 2002 poem, 'Slalu': 'Leo Schofield whose power of rapid response / Out-hitches even Hitchens.'

Schofield's only concession to octogenarian status is a more or less celebratory snow-white beard. Indeed, for many festival-goers, it seems as if Schofield has been an active part of Australian arts administration since the Sydney Opera House was a tram shed and the Victorian Arts Centre a place for a circus.

When Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was published in 1970, it created a sensation. Within six months, it had almost sold out its second print run and had been translated into eight languages. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the influence of which critics see in Greer’s book, had come out in France in 1949. The Feminine Mystique, by American psychologist Betty Friedan, had been published in 1963 and was credited with sparking feminism’s second wave. Sexual Politics, a radical literary critique of masculine portrayal of women by another American, Kate Millett, also came out in 1970.

The Female Eunuch, however, was unique. It was a mixture of scholarship, stream of consciousness, and fiery populist polemic, peppered with statistics and quotations from classic literature, fitfully footnoted and full of shocking language. Thin on theory, it was a passionate and frequently self-contradictory call to arms. Greer did not advocate equality with men, but liberty for all. She thought as little of women alienated by patriarchy as she did of the men who profited from it: even a little less, perhaps, because men’s grip on ascendancy was at least self-serving. Indeed, some feminists criticised the book as misogynistic. Greer was seen as a child of privilege who admired men more than women, perhaps the legacy of her relationship with her own parents – an absent father, an abusive mother – who figure in frequent personal references in the book.

Many women, however, credited The Female Eunuch with giving them insight into their own lives that empowered and changed them forever. It described women’s subjective experience of a world in which men’s experience was set as the objective benchmark. It described women’s bodies, not as objects of male voyeurism, but as they felt from the inside. That included subjects that ‘nice’ women did not mention, such as menstruation, hormonal changes, pregnancy, menopause, sexual arousal, and orgasm. She also drilled deep into the mythologies of romance and marriage and motherhood, and the way women were conditioned from infancy to serve men within those socially and legally sanctioned institutions. Sex roles were not biological, she maintained, but man-made, and made so cleverly that women came to believe they desired their own repression.

‘Many women ... credited The Female Eunuch with giving them insight into their own lives that empowered and changed them forever’

In her foreword to the twenty-first anniversary edition, Greer acknowledged the changes that had occurred in women’s lives in the intervening years, the ‘many new breeds of women upon the earth’, from female bodybuilders and marathon runners to female army officers to women who write unsparingly about their own sex lives. She wrote about the ubiquity of women’s magazines talking frankly about sex, the widespread availability of contraception and a new recognition of geriatric sex. ‘What more could women want?’ she asked rhetorically, and replied: ‘Freedom, that’s what. Freedom from being the thing looked at rather than the person looking back. Freedom from self-consciousness.’ Freedom from constraining clothes, from the duty to stimulate jaded male palates, and much more. Decades later, into the twenty-first century, the rise of slut culture and the pornification of women’s fashions and behaviour, almost, it would seem, as a backlash against the second wave of feminism her book exemplified, is proving her right. Even formal structural change, such as equal rights legislation, has not guaranteed improvement. In 2015, the Australian Government announced that the gender pay gap had risen to 18.8 per cent, up from previous lows of fifteen per cent.

The Female Eunuch (Paladin, 1971)

Buy this book Greer was born in Melbourne in January 1939 and educated at the Star of the Sea convent school in the bayside suburb of Gardenvale. She earned her first degree in English and French at Melbourne University, her masters on the poet Byron at Sydney, and her PhD, on love and marriage in Shakespeare, at Cambridge. She pursued extracurricular interests: in Sydney, she was a member of the libertine Sydney Push; in Cambridge she joined the Footlights theatre group. She wrote for the notoriously satirical Sydney magazine Oz, and was a co-founder and editor of the Amsterdam-based pro-pornography paper, Suck. She was photographed naked for the cover of Oz, which annoyed some feminists. They may not have realised, however, that she had struck an agreement that the male editors should also pose nude, but they reneged: a comment on sexual double standards, even among radicals, in itself.

The Female Eunuch was published while Greer was a lecturer in English literature at Warwick University, where she is still emeritus professor in English Literature and Comparative Studies. It was her first book and catapulted her into celebrity. It is unorthodox in structure: divided into four parts, called Body, Soul, Love, and Hate, and each part divided into very specificsubsections such as Bones, Curves, and Hair, for example, in Body, and Altruism, Egotism, and Obsession in Love. On many of the pages, black-bordered boxes contain quotes spanning centuries of mostly masculine views of women, which form a kind of running slide show alongside her text. Some are beyond ghastly, such as Baudelaire’s post-coital description of the ‘gluey-sided leather bag of pus’ beside him; a few are sympathetic, such as Engels’s description of the modern family, based on ‘the open or concealed slavery of the wife’.

In her introductory Summary, Greer flags her direction. The ambitions of the old suffragettes, who won women the vote and entry into professions in the earlier twentieth-century, were too limited, she suggests: ‘The genteel middle-class ladies clamoured for reform, now ungenteel middle-class women are calling for liberation.’ She also flags her Marxism. While the suffragettes had faith in the existing political system and merely demanded admittance to it, the New Left, the ‘forcing house’ of many political movements including second-wave feminism, demands much more: the coming of the classless society and the withering of the state. Not for her Betty Friedan’s reformist National Organization for Women in the United States. Greer wants every woman to revolt. She expected the strongest criticism to come from ‘my sisters of the left’ she writes, ‘because of my fantasy that it might be possible to leap the steps of revolution and arrive somehow at liberty and communism without strategy or revolutionary discipline. But if women are the true proletariat [an unattributed reference to Engels] the truly oppressed majority, the revolution can only be drawn nearer by their withdrawal of support for the capitalist system.’ She is referring specifically to the withdrawal of (under)paid labour in industry, but also, tangentially, in the home.

‘She thought as little of women alienated by patriarchy as she did of the men who profited from it: even a little less, perhaps, because men’s grip on ascendancy was at least self-serving’

Greer begins The Female Eunuch with Body, she writes, in order to establish with certainty the degree of inferiority and natural dependence of women. She doesn’t hark back to some fabled golden age, but spends chapters outlining the reality of women’s lives that has always existed. Nor does she extol any notion of sisterhood: the women she describes are competitive with each other. In fact she finds little to laud in femininity at all, even while she is demanding the elevation of the feminine.

Few cultural figures escape her critique since they have built the terrain women must negotiate. While she praises Maslow for being able to see the feminine in his ‘self-actualising’ personalities, she hops into Freud for his whole castration construct. She provides a gloss on his explanation of ‘woman’: ‘(D)uring the necessary interval between maturity and mating, she expresses her sexuality in passive fantasies; only when impregnated is she completed, for the child signifies her lost genital and her achievement, the fantasies fade, the masochism-narcissism is replaced by energy in the protection and socialization of the child.’ Greer continues: ‘It is quite a neat description of an existing mechanism, and it has proved seductive even to female theorists, who did not dare to counterpoise their subjective experience against what seemed to be objective fact. Besides, it had a moral weight.’

The Female Eunuch (Bantam, US edition, 1972)

Buy this book And yet, Greer herself approaches Freudian terminology in her definition of the female ‘eunuch’ as a woman separated from her libido and from natural desire, fattened and made docile like a castrated animal, and deprived of any capacity for action. A key difference, of course, is that Freud thought he was describing essence, while Greer is describing social conditioning. This is why revolution, not reform, is required. Women have to cast off their conditioning in its entirety: the power imbalance of subordination to men, but also the internalised self-loathing that is assuaged and hidden by all the paraphernalia of patriarchal capitalism designed to enhance women’s objectified beauty and emotional quiescence: make-up, distorting clothing, feminine hygiene products, inescapable imprisonment in stifling marriages, sexual competitiveness among themselves and – something she underlines repeatedly – increasing and increasingly unnecessary consumerism.

The gloves really come off in the final section, Hate. No one, neither men nor women, she makes the reader realise, is happy in the existing system. ‘Women have very little idea how much men hate them,’ is her startling first line. She writes of boys and girls in an average English industrial town: the boys scoring sexual favours wherever they can and despising the girls who give them what they want. ‘They do not think more highly of the unavailable girls, for they find in such exclusivity only the desire to strike a harder bargain: these are the bitches, the others are the slags. A man is bound to end up with one or the other. Marriage is viewed with fatalism, soon you are sure to find yourself screwed permanently into the system, working in a dead-end job to keep a fading woman and her noisy children in inadequate accommodation in a dull town for the term of your natural life.’

What Greer imagines as possible is exploratory and rather wild. She throws open windows rather than seriously outlining possibilities: few of her suggestions are practicable or even significant. Perhaps women could live and raise their children together, somewhere pleasant like the rolling landscapes of Italy, with local people to tend house and garden. (She doesn’t say whether those local people would be liberated too.) Women should taste their own menstrual blood, in order to overcome inculcated disgust for their own bodies: after all no-one thinks twice about sucking a bleeding lip or finger. As Linda Colley wrote in the London Review of Books in 1999: ‘Properly and historically understood, Greer is not primarily a feminist. More than anything else, she should be viewed as a utopian.’

The Female Eunuch (Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition, 2008)

Buy this book

The Female Eunuch is of its time in substance and style: slogans like ‘Right on!’ are amusingly anachronistic now. Greer recommends cooperatives and cooperative actions but, ever the intellectual, she also sees hippies as ‘limp’. Read as a document of its time, however, The Female Eunuch provides an illuminating benchmark. It is remarkable to realise how far women have come in the West in those scant forty-five years. But it is also remarkable to remember how unrealistically optimistic feminists were in the 1970s. They believed that wholesale change to the sexual organisation of Western society would come soon, and via women seizing political and economic power not merely by men ceding it. Greer could not have predicted the collapse of manufacturing in the West, which has lost many working-class women steady jobs; nor could she have foreseen the demise of unionism and the rise of zero-hours contract labour. And she certainly couldn’t have predicted the recent turn in women’s fashion – the ultra-high heels, the ultra-revealing clothing, the Brazilian waxes, the emaciation – which has weakened women physically and made them even more complicit in their own sexual objectification. Greer would have hoped her exposure of the truths about women’s subjugation would have hastened its end.

Some of her ideas are still shocking today, for the wrong reasons. She blames domestic violence for example, on the women who suffer it and lets the men off easily: ‘The degree of inebriation which is bitterly upbraided by women is so slight that it may be all but imperceptible. Much of the violence which drinking men wreak upon their women is provoked by their voiced or unvoiced reproaches.’ She discusses frigidity as a punishing expression of resentment that wives mete out to husbands. And the worst part is the circle of emotional dysfunction it creates in men: they feel both bestial and grateful when they are grudgingly allowed sex. Hypochondria is another expression of resentment, ‘often motivated by continual reproach and not organic at all’. In many places she seems to understand how men tick, but believes that few other women – ordinary women – do. She, by contrast, understands and even in places sympathises with masculinity and, as an extraordinary woman, can rise above its demands.

The Female Eunuch was written, in fact, by an extraordinary woman and it remains a landmark text. A seminal feminist work, it is also an important historical record of a period of dramatic social, political, and economic change.

References

Colley, Linda. ‘Stubble and Breath’, London Review of Books, 15 July, 1999
Cusk, Rachel. ‘The Female Eunuch, 40 years on’, The Guardian, 20 November, 2010.
Diamond, Arlyn. ‘Elizabeth Janeway and Germaine Greer’, The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 13, No. 1/2, Woman: An Issue (Winter–Spring, 1972).
Fogarty, Michael P. Review of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan; Patriarchal Attitudes by Eva Figes; The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer; Sexual Politics by Kate Millet; Woman’s Estate by Juliet Mitchell; Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement by Robin Morgan; Voices from Women’s Liberation by Leslie B. Tanner, International Review of Vol. 19, No. 1, The Education of Women (1973).
Nowra, Louis. ‘The Better Self? Germaine Greer and “The Female Eunuch”’, The Monthly, March, 2010.
Presser, Harriet B. ‘Feminism and the Status of Women’, Family Planning Perspectives Vol. 4, No. 2 (April, 1972).

Of all the stories John le Carré has invented – more than a score of novels, nearly all bestsellers – his own is perhaps the most fascinating. It is dominated by two characters, le Carré himself (real name David Cornwell) and his father, Ronnie.

Biographers naturally pay close attention to the influence of their subjects' parents, but seldom can they encounter such extremes as Adam Sisman does in this beautifully written and extremely detailed account, John le Carré: The Biography. David was abandoned by his mother at five and endured 'sixteen hugless years'. He was left to the tender mercies of Ronnie, a spiv, a philanderer who even groped his children, a conman who served time for fraud, but also an inventive and irresistible man who could light up a room. 'We was all bent, son,' one of Ronnie's 'court' later tells David, 'but your dad was very, very bent.'

Life didn't improve much when young David was sent to boarding school, where he endured a double life of outward conformity and inner rebellion that he subsequently likened to living in occupied territory. He suffered unbearable moral conflict between the school's code and loyalty to his father. Sisman writes: 'At school, David was being trained to run an empire; at home he was helping diddle widows out of their pensions.' At sixteen he fled to Switzerland and university. Even as an adult, David continued to suffer. His father exploited him, traded on his name as a successful author, and even pretended to be him in pursuit of nefarious schemes. At one point, Ronnie extorted $14,000 from David by threatening to sue him for libel.

Ronnie scarred David in myriad ways. But he also endowed him with gifts: charm, flexibility, mimicry, and the conman's unerring eye for detail – speech, landscape, character – so evident throughout le Carré's oeuvre. Perhaps above all, Ronnie gave his son a capacity for secrecy, for hiding in plain sight, for lying plausibly.

Sisman moves with aplomb between le Carré the author and Cornwell the man, probing some uncomfortable areas. All his life, le Carré has cultivated an air of mystery, especially surrounding his time with MI5 and MI6. He has drawn repeatedly on his own life in his novels, reimagining and reshaping encounters and events that then tend to replace the originals in his own memory. But he is also a careful researcher who has endured discomfort and risk for the sake of verisimilitude.

David Cornwell posing as a spy in London in 1964 for Life magazine shortly after being outed as the author of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

It was his realism that drew me to le Carré. He created a new mould for the spy thriller in depicting intelligence work as less about derring-do than patience and perseverance, finding and placing the jigsaw pieces. Above all, he is convincing in depicting the extent to which internal politics and rivalries shape the business, and in the way he conveys all the doubts, ambiguities, and complexities of real life. The diffident and vulnerable spymaster George Smiley is one of the great literary creations. A portly, myopic cuckold who is also brilliant, tenacious, and politically astute, he could scarcely be more different from the traditional model spy exemplified by James Bond.

Many critics and fans thought le Carré's career would end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, so closely was he identified with the Cold War, but, as Sisman observes, he had a knack of being ahead of the news with novel after novel. There is an element of autobiography in most of them – above all A Perfect Spy (1986), in which Cornwell set out to exorcise his father. He later said this book 'alleviated my suffering'. Writing, it seems, acted as psychotherapy.

Cornwell's friend Nicholas Shakespeare provides an excellent summary of the man Sisman reveals: 'In his company I felt exhilarated and engaged. I found him courageous, generous, complicated, competitive, touchy, watchful, suspicious and incineratingly honest, although perhaps not in every single instance about himself.'

Where le Carré belongs in the literary pantheon is still debated. Blake Morrison called him 'the laureate of Britain's post-imperial sleepwalk'; Ian McEwan said he deserved the Booker Prize; David Mamet has described him as one of the greatest novelists in English. Others have dismissed him as a mere genre writer, not least Anthony Burgess, who said that Cornwell's talents 'cry out to be employed in the creation of a real novel'.

There can be few doubts about the merits of Sisman's portrayal, however, which is a model of the biographer's art. Inevitably, it slows in the second half in fitting the events and characters of the books into Cornwell's life, which is sometimes necessarily speculative.

Writing about a living subject adds complications, such as having to defer to his wishes; Sisman notes that he has done so occasionally. Cornwell is unreliable because of his large number of false memories and conflicting accounts, exacerbated by his occasional desire to obfuscate. This is not bad faith, Sisman says, so much as evidence that Cornwell, like all of us, edits his past.

Sisman observes that the book is a work in progress; he invites anyone who may have something to contribute to write to him. Perhaps, unusually, this fascinating book is an interim volume, with a more complete revelation to follow. It certainly whets the appetite.

As he reminds his readers on numerous occasions in The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, Harold Bloom is now well into his eighties. He has spent a lifetime teaching and writing about literature at Yale University, where he has long claimed to constitute a 'department of one'. The claim is part lament, part affectation, part boast. But it is true enough that Bloom is an uncommon critic. His achievements include developing theories of literary influence, creativity, and canonisation that are so obviously extensions of his aesthetic preferences that he regularly abandons the pretence that they are anything else. He writes of his devotion to literature as if it were a private religion and a source of solace, interrupting his exegeses to garland works that embody his ideal of greatness, or to reminisce about reading them for the first time, or to comment on their enduring personal appeal. He holds a 'firm conviction that true criticism recognizes itself as a mode of memoir'. In a passage that characterises literary criticism as a form of projection, he remarks: 'I believe there is no critical method except yourself.'

The line is a sly rewriting of T.S. Eliot's assertion that the only method is to be 'very intelligent'. And like Eliot's maxim, it is more of a rhetorical flourish than an applicable formula. (I mean, it's not exactly a helpful observation, is it?) It does, however, raise a number of pertinent questions about Bloom's thinking and what exactly we are to make of the elaborate architecture of his literary theories.

For fifty years after his death, the works of the most influential English-language poet of the twentieth century were unavailable in a scholarly edition. Moreover, Collected Poems, 1909–1962, arranged by T.S. Eliot himself and published in 1963, contained a number of widely recognised textual errors. The publication of The Poems of T.S. Eliot edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, brings this absurd situation to an end. The new edition is the most complete version of the Eliot corpus yet assembled: it begins with the 1963 Collected Poems; incorporates Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939); folds in Ricks's edition of Eliot's juvenilia and ephemera, Inventions of the March Hare (1996); and adds scores of previously uncollected poems along the way. (Offering an exact number is difficult insofar as these additional poems range from poem sequences to two-line fragments; suffice it to say, the contents lists seventy-eight previously unpublished titles.) All of these are accompanied by an overawing editorial commentary and a textual history which, as a proportion of the material in this edition, dwarf the poems themselves. An edition like this is necessarily the servant of two masters: general readers and specialist scholars will come to it with differing needs and expectations. The Poems splits the difference by providing a more comprehensive textual history than ordinary readers will use, and a more didactic commentary than scholars will need.

Jennifer Down's first novel, Our Magic Hour, is notable for its stylistic individuality. The novel's opening is disorientating at first: Audrey wears a shirt whose 'sleeves swallowed her hands'; spaghetti bolognese 'spatters' on a stove; a football match 'bellows' from a television. This is an object-rich terrain, in which the details provide cues to interpreting the fictional world.

Audrey, Katy, and Adam were friends in high school – their bond was close, even claustrophobic: they shared beds and their conversations were frank, at times needful. As the narrative begins, Katy has taken her own life, and Audrey and Adam are grieving. When Audrey receives the news, Katy's coat is still draped over a chair in Audrey's kitchen, 'an exoskeleton left behind'. Audrey's mostly happy relationship with Nick is fraying; Adam keeps 'getting scared of everything'.

It has been two hundred and seventy-six years since Pamela was published, the first piece of writing in English in the novel form; it was a structure designed both to entertain and instruct, and still we are debating if the concept was a good idea.

Inga Simpson is the author of two previous novels, Mr Wigg (2013) and Nest (2014). Both have been critically acclaimed and shortlisted for literary prizes, and Nest was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. This pedigree raises expectations that Where The Trees Were is a significant book of ideas.

Simpson has decided on a popular construct, the social historical narrative – the story of Jayne, a country girl, who becomes an art history curator. Her four best friends are boys from local properties, and we follow them as their lives play out after a tragic accident changes the group forever.

The Millennium Drought already looms large in Australia's recent past. It has joined the ranks of the Federation Drought and other acute, lengthy dry periods that have national resonance and are reflected on by historians, farmers, and politicians alike as defining moments in Australia's history. These droughts are etched into landscapes and people's minds, bodies, and history books. The Millennium Drought started in 2000 and went to 2010.

Right? Maybe. The start dates and end dates are tricky to pin down. I imagine that if you asked Deb Anderson when the Millennium Drought (or any drought) started, she might say that it would depend a little on where you were, a little on what you were doing, a little on your historical points of reference, and quite a bit on your lived experience.

Jason Stanley argues in his new book that propaganda is more prevalent within liberal democracies – and is of far greater concern – than is typically assumed. Indeed, Stanley suggests that the very idea that propaganda only proliferates within authoritarian regimes, which have ministries set aside for its production, is a central tenet of the propaganda of the West. Stanley's aim in this book is to outline the distinctive features of propaganda within a liberal democracy (he is particularly focused on the United States). On his account, the 'flawed ideology' of vested and powerful interest groups undermines the genuinely valuable ideals at the heart of the democratic project; this is what he refers to as 'demagogic propaganda'. Although I am highly sceptical of the argumentative strategies Stanley employs, the book raises significant issues about the extent to which public debates in countries like the United States and Australia involve distorted conceptions of what democratic principles properly entail.

Atlantic history and the closely related phrase 'Atlantic World' refer to a geographical/historical way of thinking about interactions among peoples of Europe, Africa, and the Americas between about 1500 and 1900. Practitioners of Atlantic history, like other scholars washed up from the wreck of nation-based historical writing, find it impossible to comprehend the processes that made the modern world without looking beyond state frontiers. They have likewise cut loose from concepts that dominated historical studies sixty years ago like 'the Rise of the West', the Age of Exploration, and Imperialism. The trouble with such perspectives was that they cast history as a cavalcade driven by a few European actors on a road to preordained world domination. As China and India reclaim their historic positions at the top of the global pecking order, other explanatory models are required to explain how we all got where we are – whether it is Manhattan, Paris, the Amazonian rainforest, or Haiti.

The new Atlantic historians do not practise Big History in the David Christian mode. They pay no attention to the Big Bang or to the formation of continents. They do, however, interest themselves in a long sweep of climate change. For instance, the so-called 'Little Ice Age' stretching from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century exacerbated droughts in North Africa and North America that set a great many people in motion, generating new kinds of conflict and economic interaction.

A year or so after I had begun my work in the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, the immortal words of 'Ern Malley', 'The emotions are not skilled workers', bored a hole into my brain, dug around a bit, and settled there as a perpetual irritant. Malley's phrase has an oblique genealogy. Coined by James McAuley and Harold Stewart as an enigmatic pronouncement of the fictional poet, it was ostensibly a quotation from Lenin. Chris Wallace-Crabbe also invoked it as the title of his 1980 poetry collection. The emotional baggage of this phrase, then, is not inconsiderable.

From time to time, as the research of our Centre proceeds, this phrase comes to mind again. Sometimes I embrace it to marvel at the ways the emotions resist many of our best attempts to track and understand their elusive dynamics. This happens especially when I am thinking about the slightly anomalous role that literary texts play in the history of emotions: it can be a good thing that the emotions resist the attempt to pigeonhole, name and categorise all forms of behaviour, and literature is a prime case of emotional work that can be both powerful yet ambiguous. But at other times this phrase haunts me more darkly: how can we make sense of a scholarly field that is so diffuse and so divided, its subject matter so elusive? What kind of skilled work do the emotions need?

Last year, a trip to the Pentridge Prison grounds – what's left of them – gave me a hundred insights into the horrors of life in that institution: the close quarters, constant surveillance, poor sanitation, and dependence on interminable, senseless routine, an imagined reform through discipline. These insights gave only a small understanding of the rigours of incarceration in Pentridge.

Don Osborne's Pentridge: Behind the Bluestone Walls seeks to repopulate the compounds and yards behind the stark bluestone edifice. Part memoir, part 'true crime' rehash, the handsomely designed work provides a range of stories both compelling and gruesome – and almost uniformly sad. Most of the men Osborne describes in his book, many of whom he had interaction with when he worked at the prison forty years ago, seem to have been victims of abuse in childhood which set them on an early course as perpetrators of (often horrifying) crimes. Linking the stories is an archaic set of reform and/or punishment principles, rigidly enforced. These made Pentridge Prison a nightmare for thousands of inmates for close to a century and a half until it began winding down operations – with a few misdirections during the reform process initiated by the Hamer government in the 1970s, leading to the ill-fated Jika Jika compound of 1980–87.

Have the French thought themselves to death? This is the question that Sudhir Hazareesingh poses in this erudite and stimulating book. His concluding chapter is a piece of diplomatic fence-sitting, but, notwithstanding the claim of the subtitle's affection, much of the analysis points to a national culture in terminal decline, inward-looking, nostalgic for past glories, anxious for its future, and stuck with entrenched thinking patterns that no longer offer purchase on innovation or renewal.

A self-confessed Francophile of Mauritian background, Hazareesingh divides his time between Paris and Oxford, and has authored prize-winning books on two of the grandes figures of modern France – Napoleon and de Gaulle. His new project is a sweeping four-century history of the thinkers and ideas that he argues have given France its distinctiveness and have underpinned its (now much diminished) prestige and influence in world affairs.

What do we talk about when we talk about history? This is a question that Anna Clark has devoted her career to answering. She has followed the conversations Australians have about history into museums and universities – The History Wars (2003) and Australian History Now! (2013) – and classrooms and staffrooms – Teaching the Nation (2006) and History's Children (2008). With Private Lives, Public History, she has turned her mind to the broader Australian public. She searches out 'ordinary' Australians – the 'working families', 'taxpayers', and 'battlers' who live out in 'lawnmower land' – to ask them what they think of Australian history.

But who are ordinary Australians? Who are the people over whom the history wars were fought? Clark's 'Mr Everyman' is made up of 100 interviewees, mostly women, from five communities that 'broadly reflect the geographical, cultural and socio-economic diversity of Australia': Marrickville, Chatswood, Brimbank, Rockhampton, and Derby. The interviews were conducted in small groups and one-on-ones. Clark laments that the rich sensory experience of these sessions is missing in the book: 'How to transcribe the loud crack of a tinnie during my visit to the Derby Bowling Club?'

What is it about wars and the military that produce so much innovation and capacity? This a big and bold book which takes the contemporary collective awareness of Australia's wartime efforts on the battlefield and reflects on the building of the country on the back of the victory in 1945. It also invites the question of how best we can address the imperatives of building social infrastructure.

1939 was a watershed year in a number of ways. As Stuart Macintyre explains, the nation was in continuing decline following the Depression of the late 1920s (with nine per cent unemployment), and was faced with yet another major war on top of the terrible losses in World War I. On the backing of Britain's declaration of support in the face of the threat from an expansionist Japan, Australia committed to assist in the defence of Britain and reluctantly entered yet another European war.

Food in history is a tantalising thing. Although we may have recipes, firsthand descriptions, and images, we can never be sure how things really looked or tasted. Much of the work of food historians has been focused on creative use of available sources, not to provide facsimile meals, but to gain insight into the cultural role of food of the past. Two recent books explore different aspects of food in history. Both are, refreshingly, free of recipes.

From the Getty Research Institute comes a fascinating new volume, The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals (Getty Research Institute, $62 hb, 190 pp, 9781606064542), which accompanied a recent exhibition of the same name. The exhibition at the Getty Centre, Los Angeles, was drawn from the Getty's rich holdings of illustrated books, prints, manuscripts, and decorative arts, supplemented with loaned works. It was a compelling visual record of a vanished art form.

In 2009 Sonya Voumard read about a legal claim brought by Martin Bryant's mother, Carleen, against journalists Robert Wainwright and Paola Totaro, accusing them of using her personal manuscript, letters, and family photos without her permission in their book Born or Bred? Martin Bryant: The Making of a Mass Murderer. Struck by the complex ethics of the case, Voumard found herself, in the words of American writer Janet Malcolm, afflicted by 'the familiar stirrings of reportorial desire'. She started to research the journalism, ethics, and storytelling surrounding the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, focusing on the media's treatment of Carleen Bryant.

As a liberal-minded, London-based philosopher prepared to engage in the mainstream press with major topics of the day, A.C. Grayling is always up for a challenge. Although much of Grayling's commentary conforms to the classical liberal view of things, now and then logic dictates that he takes a stance that may seem radical in those terms.

From the cover of Jennifer Maiden's latest book (The Fox Petition, Giramondo, $24 pb, 96 pp, 9781922146946), a wood-cut fox stares the reader down. This foreign, seditious animal is the perfect emblem for Maiden's examination of the xenophobia, conformity, and general moral diminution that she sees around her. Giramondo have given Maiden the liberty of an annual collection; as she says, this prospect 'encourages urgency wonderfully'.

The catalyst for urgency in this book was the NSW Biosecurity Unit's proscription, Border Force-style, of foxes, even as pets. Her poetry here has the freedom of improvisation, spiralling freely around any facts or notions in more or less the key of 'foxness'. When the poet comes across a real fox, for example, 'it stood its ground and looked so patrician', summoning both Charles Fox, that radical petitioner for liberty, and Nye Bevan, with 'the patrician tone of his Welsh miner's voice'. 'If I spoke to the fox without / killing it, I would be charged, but / we once had much in common. A quality / spare and wild with desperation / in its streetlamp eyes, its old headlight / eyes could still suggest a city / in shifting shapes, its identity / aristocratic in lost deceptions.'

Before his first Brazilian sojourn in 1936, Stefan Zweig – the Viennese author who enjoyed fame as the most widely translated writer in the world between the two world wars – deemed the South American country 'terra incognita in the cultural sense'. Once it had also been unknown in the geographical sense, this 'land that one should hardly call a country anymore, but rather a continent', as Zweig writes in Brazil (1941). 'There I was confronted not only with one of the most magnificent landscapes on earth – that unique combination of sea and mountains, city and tropical nature – but also with a completely new kind of civilization.'

The cultural and mineral wealth of the country, along with its vast diversities, impressed Zweig so much that he made plans to return for a prolonged visit. History intervened. First came the Spanish Civil War, in 1936. Two years later, Zweig's native Austria fell, followed by Poland. He made plans to leave 'suicidal Europe': 'I more and more passionately wished to escape for a time from a world that was destroying itself, into one that was peacefully and creatively building,' he writes. Zweig returned to Brazil, living there until his death in early 1942.

In an interview from 1978, the year of Nicolas Nabokov's death (he was born in 1903 in Lubcza, now in Belarus), which is included in the epilogue to this volume, Isaiah Berlin summed up some of the qualities of the cosmopolitan figure he seems to have considered his best friend:

He was a very cultivated man: I found him to be one of the most civilized men I ever met, a perfect representative of the pre-Russian Revolution intelligentsia. He had mastered vast amounts of knowledge, had wide horizons and a wonderful imagination; he was also one of the warmest and most sympathetic of men ... His charm was extraordinary.

Judging by the array of figures who parade through the pages of this study, Nikolai Dmitrievich Nabokov seems to have been on first-name terms with just about everybody who was anybody in twentieth-century arts and culture. He was a close friend, if occasional adversary, of Stravinsky, knew Prokofiev, was a colleague of Balanchine, Lifar, Virgil Thomson, Igor Markevitch, Auden, Arthur Schlesinger – the list goes on. Giroud's tenacity and thoroughness in tracking down every little detail relating to Nabokov's constant travels and fondness for parties and social occasions, and his use of a series of archives as well as Nabokov's own, are admirable and systematic.

Zachary Leader, respected biographer of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow, and editor of this volume of commissioned essays, defines life writing as 'a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed'. This formulation reflects the book's method, which is to provide a 'sampling' of various periods, genres, issues in and approaches to life writing (though it makes no mention of Margaretta Jolly's vastly more inclusive 'sampling', the 2001 Encyclopedia of Life Writing).

James Shapiro's scholarly 'Unravelling Shakespeare's Life' argues that the Bildungsroman 'coming of age' narrative has ill served lives of the Bard by inclining biographers to information-starved speculations about how he was shaped. Michael Dobson's 'A Boy from Stratford, 1769–1916: Shakespearean Biography and Romantic Nationalism', which tracks representations of the young Shakespeare through centuries of popular culture, links helpfully with Shapiro's discussion. In addition to written narrative, Dobson considers visual representations and cultural events and is ever alert to larger ideological implications of his subject. William St Clair's 'Romantic Biography: Conveying Personality, Intimacy, and Authenticity in an Age of Ink on Paper' extends the volume's consideration of the visual arts and also its interpretative range. St Clair's fine-grained discussion of the ways in which literary and visual devices were used to maximise the sense of intimacy in Romantic representations, especially of Byron, is Marxist-semiotic in orientation.

When I heard that there was a new book out on why women run, I assumed I would be reading about women fleeing domestic horrors rather than running marathons. Such a reaction might make Catriona Menzies-Pike sigh with frustration, and the cultural myopia which gave rise to my unthinking assumption is one of the reasons she wrote this book. 'I'd read a lot of books about running, but I struggled to recognise myself in any of them.'

Not a year passes without someone claiming to have stumbled upon the legendary Tasmanian tiger. A flash of stripes, a tawny blur, strange paw prints in the mud; are these genuine sightings or mass hallucinations suffered by a populace whose grief for the extinct icon is stuck in a state of collective denial? 'Tassie loves the tiger now ... this entire country is going to be saying sorry forever'; so muses one character of Sarah Kanake's first novel, in which an absent species is both metaphor and backdrop to a drama about human loss and 'the unending, circling misery' of not letting go.

Emily Maguire's An Isolated Incident explores the media's fascination with beautiful, murdered women. The novel also interrogates the experiences of those who find themselves involved in murder cases.

The novel is set in Strathdee, a fictitious rural Australian town. This 'lovely little' hamlet has been unsettled by the slaying of Bella Michaels, a 'photogenic' young resident. Bella's older sister, Chris, finds herself in a particularly nightmarish situation. She must deal not only with her own grief, but also the hostility of the local police force. This hostility is due in no small part to the fact that Chris dabbles in sex work.  An Isolated Incident cuts between Chris's travails and the media reportage of her sister's murder. This reportage is produced by May Norman, a small-time crime journalist whose career ambitions take a back seat to her obsession with the case.

Maguire's novel merges feminist media analysis with fictional narrative. This merger is confident, save for a few overly polemical passages, for example: 'Homicide investigations ... open up private lives in an unprecedented way.' Chris's raw emotions and salty language are effectively juxtaposed with May's trite, tabloidesque accounts of Bella's death. Much of the novel focuses on May's escalating obsession with the murder. This obsession is convincingly and sensitively depicted. The transcripts of her interviews with Strathdee locals reveal an earnest but naïve individual who has failed to grasp the human dimensions of Bella's death.

The only real problem with An Isolated Incident concerns Maguire's failure to adequately draw out the implications of the title. Femicide cases are often framed as isolated bursts of misogynist violence in an otherwise peaceful society. (Think, for example, of the media coverage surrounding the 2012 death of Jill Meagher.) Otherwise, this is a taut and timely text.

Boccaccio started an avalanche of storytelling with The Decameron. His one hundred tales, told by ten narrators taking refuge from the Black Death in a villa outside Florence, have inspired a horde of copycats over the ensuing 660 years. Most famous of these is The Canterbury Tales. Although Don Aitkin's title echoes Chaucer's, his collection of stories pays higher tribute to Boccaccio's and shares similar themes: seduction, trickery, and life lessons.

Is it possible to 'just pack up and go, and all your problems will stay behind?' Nicolette is hoping that's the case when we meet her literally on the road to a new life, troubled partner and toddler in tow. Louis, her grandfather, may well have asked the same; his earlier experiences of geographic and personal change form the alternate strand of the dual narrative in That Devil's Madness.

TROVE CURTAILED

Dear Editor,

As President of the Australian Historical Association, on 2 March I sent the following letter to the Hon. Malcolm Turnbull MP, Prime Minister of Australia, (and copied it to the Hon. Bill Shorten MP, Leader of the Opposition; Senator the Hon. Mitch Fifield, Minister for the Arts; and the Hon. Mark Dreyfus QC, MP, Shadow Minister for the Arts):

Dear Mr Turnbull,

As the peak body representing historians in Australia, the Australian Historical Association is extremely concerned about further cuts to the budgets of our national collecting institutions. Our national institutions, including the National Library, the National Archives, the National Museum, the Museum of Australian Democracy, and the National Film and Sound Archive are the most prominent storehouses of our collective identity and culture. When they cannot fulfil their missions to collect, preserve, interpret, and enable research access, we are all diminished.

WHY DO YOU WRITE?

It is the best excuse I've found to play music all day. And to understand my country.

ARE YOU A VIVID DREAMER?

Not that I recall. I am a very heavy sleeper. But my mind does wander during the day.

WHERE ARE YOU HAPPIEST?

On my bike, on a tennis court, or at a Richmond home game at the MCG. That is, when I get to be a boy again. My adult self looks forward to a day off on the couch when I can read for leisure and binge on DVDs.

Porter Prize winner

Amanda Joy, from Western Australia, was named overall winner of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize at a Boyd ceremony on 9 March. Her poem is entitled 'Tailings'. All five shortlisted poets introduced and read their poems – two of them disembodiedly (Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet from the United States, Dan Disney from Korea). Amanda Joy received $5,000 and a print by Arthur Boyd; the other poets each received $625.

In their report, the judges – Luke Davies, Lisa Gorton, and Kate Middleton – described 'Tailings' as 'a poem remarkable for its close-woven language, everywhere charged with vivid details; and, at the same time, remarkable for its open and wide-ranging attentiveness. In "Tailings" the poet nowhere sets place at an aesthetic distance but everywhere attends to its mess and profligacy, a mode of perception alive to the hunger of animals.' The full report is available here.

Amanda Joy at the 2016 Peter Porter Poetry Prize ceremonyAmanda Joy told Arts Update: 'I am delighted and deeply humbled to have won this prestigious prize honouring Peter Porter. To have been included in such a fine shortlist and published in ABR was thrilling enough. I am wildly grateful to the judges, the shortlisted poets, all three judges, Peter Rose and the staff at ABR. This is such a wonderful portent for my new collection.'

Before the announcement, several people read poems by Peter Porter. These included the poet's daughter Jane, who lives in Melbourne, and Morag Fraser, who generously supports this prize. Judith Bishop – the only person to have won ABR's poetry prize twice, and the first winner of the Porter Prize, as it was renamed in 2011 – read from the new collection of Peter Porter's final poems, Chorale at the Crossing (Picador).

(Click here to listen to a conversation between Porter Prize judges Lisa Gorton and Luke Davies about the judging process)

Our new reader survey

We love hearing from readers as to what they like about Australian Book Review – whom they enjoy reading; what they would like to see more (or less) of. Please complete our reader survey and help us to go on improving the magazine. The survey takes about five minutes to complete. Feel free to skip any questions that don't interest you. The survey is totally anonymous – unless you want to be in the running for one of two five-year complimentary subscriptions to ABR Online (in which case we will need your name and email address).

Loving kindness

Australia has several lucrative prizes for individual poems, including the ACU Prize for Poetry, which is now open until 6 June. The total prize money is $10,000 (of which the winner receives $7,000). The ACU Prize 'aims to support writers and to continue the tradition of the Catholic Church as a key patron of the arts'. The theme this year is 'loving kindness', inspired by Isaac Bashevis Singer's remark, 'Kindness, I've discovered, is everything in life.'

Jolley Prize news

2016 has been an exciting year for our past Jolley Prize winners and shortlisted authors. Jennifer Down won the 2014 Jolley Prize with her story 'Aokigahara' and her début novel Our Magic Hour was released in February by Text Publishing. You can read Gretchen Shirm's review in this issue here. Text will also be publishing the Australian edition of Jack Cox's début novel Dodge Rose (first published by Dalkey Archive Press) in May. His 2012 Jolley Prize shortlisted story was 'Gorgeous Perambulator'. And Michelle Michau-Crawford's début short story collection Leaving Elvis and other stories (reviewed by Francesca Sasnaitis in our March issue) is out now from UWA Publishing and will be launched at an event in Perth on April 6. 'Leaving Elvis' was the title of her 2013 Jolley Prize winning story published in the October 2013 issue. Michau-Crawford was our 'Future Tense' guest in the January-February issue. The 2016 Jolley Prize (now worth a total of $12,500) closes on at midnight on April 18.

States of Poetry

Our new federally organised poetry anthology project – funded by Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund – is off to a buzzy start around the country. During Writers' Week, in front of hundreds of poetry lovers, South Australian state editor Peter Goldsworthy introduced five of the six poets included in his selection (single works by all six appeared in our March issue).

Next month, on 4 May, state editor Elizabeth Allen and ABR Editor Peter Rose will introduce the poets included in the New South Wales anthology: Susie Anderson, Pam Brown, Toby Fitch, David Malouf, Kate Middleton, and Fiona Wright. Joining the featured poets will be ABR Laureate's Fellow Michael Aiken.This is a free event at Gleebooks, starting at 6 pm. You can rsvp online via Gleebooks or call them on (02) 9660 2333.

Meanwhile, three full state anthologies appear on our website, all open-access: ACT, Queensland, and Victoria. South Australia will be released shortly.

Back to Booktown

Regional literary festivals can be unusually satisfying, and the Clunes Booktown Festival is one of the more congenial as well as impoverishing, because of the antiquarian booksellers who throng the old gold town. This year, Booktown celebrates its tenth birthday. The festival runs from 30 April to 2 May. There will be a significantly expanded speaker program at this year's festival. Speakers will include Fran Bryson, Arnold Zable, Gregory Day, Rod Jones, and Helga Leunig.

Hospital corners

The library of Text Classics continues to grow, auspiciously. This month we have a new edition of M.J. Hyland's Carry Me Down (2006), introduced by J.M. Coetzee, who writes in his Afterword: 'Like Henry James's What Maisie Knew, to which it owes an obvious debt, Carry Me Down works by indirection.' Reviewing the novel in the March 2006 issue of ABR, Michelle Griffin admired her 'steely' prose: 'Her sentences are so crisp they have hospital corners.'

May will bring John Foster's memoir, Take Me to Paris, Johnny (1993), introduced by Peter Craven, with an Afterword by John Rickard. In October, Text will publish four novels by Christina Stead. Introducers will include David Malouf (A Little Tea, A Little Chat, 1948) and Margaret Harris (The Beauties and Furies, 1936).

These welcome reprints are priced at just $12.95 each – remarkable value given their pedigree.

Arts Update

David Malouf is not alone in regarding ABR as 'essential reading for anyone here who is seriously interested in any of the arts'. Arts Update continues to grow all the time, with new arts journalists contributing timely, lengthy, considered reviews of films, plays, operas, concerts, dance, festivals, and art exhibitions. In our fortnightly Arts Update e-bulletin we offer subscribers double passes to major performances or films. If you don't subscribe to the e-bulletin, all you have to do is click here to sign up.