Sheila Fitzpatrick

Originally published in German, Albrecht Dümling’s The Vanished Musicians: Jewish refugees in Australia (Peter Lang), a fascinating compendium of Jewish musicians who found refuge in Australia in the 1930s and 1940s, is now available in Australian Diana K. Weekes’s excellent translation.

Kevin Windle, Elena Govor, and Alexander Massov’s From St Petersburg to Port Jackson: Russian travellers’ tales of Australia 1807–1912 (Australian Scholarly Publishing) is a treasure trove for anyone with a weakness for ship’s captains’ and spunky young Russian ladies’ impressions of our native land. It was a Russian ship that in 1814 brought the news of Napoleon’s defeat to Sydney.

Next is David Brophy’s Uyghur Nation: Reform and revolution on the Russia-China frontier (Harvard University Press). If you have ever wondered who the Uyghurs are, Brophy, who teaches at the University of Sydney, is the man to go to.

The Great Departure: Mass migration from Eastern Europe and the making of the Free World (W.W. Norton), by Tara Zahra, is a ‘must read’ for history buffs as well as migration scholars.

Miriam Cosic

Four books stood out for me this year. David Rieff’s In Praise of Forgetting: Historical memory and its ironies (Yale University Press, reviewed in ABR 6/16) makes a startling argument: that cultivating historical memory, especially in the political realm, may do more harm than good.

American writer Shadi Hamid’s controversial Islamic Exceptionalism: How the struggle over Islam is reshaping the world (St Martin’s Press) examines how the difficulty of reconciling secularism and Islam not only makes integration tricky for Muslims in the West, but perpetuates sectarian war within the religion.

When Breath Becomes Air (Bodley Head), by Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who chronicled his own death from cancer, is simply extraordinary: humane, poetic, moving, and enlightening. And Sebastian Smee – The Australian’s former art critic, now with the Boston Globe – has written a riveting study, The Art of Rivalry: Four friendships, betrayals, and breakthroughs in modern art (Text Publishing, 11/16), the title of which says it all.

James Bradley

I’m not sure any book I’ve read this year has affected me as much as Annie Proulx’s monumental account of the human and environmental catastrophe of North America’s forests, Barkskins (Fourth Estate, 8/16). While it isn’t without its faults, in particular its desire to include everything, that same encyclopedic impulse and sense of incoherent grief lends it extraordinary power and breadth, and makes it necessary reading for anybody interested in the environment.

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Some Rain Must Fall (Vintage) is also encyclopedic, albeit in a personal sense, and manages the not inconsiderable trick of being both scarifyingly funny and deeply moving (how many other writers are likely to describe getting drunk and throwing up in Björk’s toilet?).

Finally, I loved my friend Georgia Blain’s Between a Wolf and a Dog (Scribe, 5/16). Like all her novels, it explores the often unarticulated complexities of the intersection of the personal and the political with exquisite grace and intelligence.

Everybody thinks they know about Tim Winton: the working-class hero from the West; the whale of a man who’s been writing since he was a boy; the master of one of those big Australian prose styles that is muscular and magnetic and sometimes just a bit too self-delighting; someone who straddles the literary and the popular like a colossus.

Whatever you think of The Riders (1994), Dirt Music (2001), or Breath (2008), did anyone ever put them down in a hurry? If I’m sounding ambivalent, I shouldn’t be, because this new self-portrait via a suite of essays is a dazzling book, full of wisdom and wonder, written in, yes, muscular prose but with a staggering, effortless sense of drama wherever you pick it up. Tim Winton can fascinate you and bring you to the point of tears even when you thought you weren’t interested in what he’s talking about.

We begin with the dark biographical melodrama of teenage Tim, alienated and adrift, pointing a gun at passers-by in front of the curtain, not with a desire to kill, not with the gun even loaded, but knowing he could. ‘Lurking there behind my parents’ curtain, I put a gun between myself and the world. I reduced my neighbours to objects, made targets of them. Anything could have happened. None of it could.’

If that sounds self-dramatising, it justifies its every word, including the reflection that he found his way out through words. There is thus a sort of continuity when we jump back to the eight-year-old Winton being subjected to the empty spaces and psychedelic aporias of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, he says, ‘sent me through a Star Gate of my own into an expanded reality ... it was a wormhole into the life of the imagination’.

No one is better than Tim Winton at giving dramatic substance to the interface between art and life. It is extraordinary how much he fictionalises the process of factual narration.

His father, a traffic cop, was in a dreadful accident from which he might never have recovered. Something happens that fills young Winton with the terror of that memory. He says he has dreaded such sudden moments but also made them into a kind of aesthetic raison d’être. ‘In my fiction I’ve been a chronicler of sudden moments like these ... my life feels like a topography of accidents... I suppose you could say they form a large part of my sentimental education.’ This tallies with the darker side of Winton’s vision as a writer of fiction without being remotely arty or self-reflexive when he adds, ‘but now I knew that we were not, and never really could be, out of the woods’.

You could accuse Tim Winton of a kind of agnostic Calvinism where the individual is predestined to his own dark woods, but he is always so open and so sane, so modest in his bracing doubts and more bracing faith. He gives a humorous and humane depiction of the working-class Church of Christ community that shaped him and to which his parents were impelled like zealots after his father’s life was saved, perhaps by the intervention of some saint. A sauntering, naturalistic evocation of a narrowly evangelical community, it is full of laughter and farting and the face of human fun. It was that one-time Jesuit Greg Dening who said that at the heart of any absolutism there is an inch of licence that makes it tolerable. Winton is superb and convincing on the subject of how a world of straitlaced people in Pelaco shirts and staid skirts went a great distance towards teaching him what was what.

They taught him, through Scripture, the importance of story and that the example of Christ, so plain, so given to sacrifice and kindness, was a harder saying than all the blood and thunder of the Old Testament. The Word also taught him the power of all words. When St Paul said – and young Winton learned the words by heart – ‘For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord’, it gave him entrée to the kind of language he would encounter in Hamlet’s ‘what a piece of work is man ...’ He grew up, he says, ‘riding incantatory rhythms toward the stifling reaches of afternoon’, but admits he never would have foreseen that the Church itself would become the greatest threat to his faith. He says he has come to like the smells and bells and that he crosses himself like a papist even if ‘a roomful of rockchoppers certainly brings out the Calvinist in me’, though most of his ‘heroes “belong to Rome”, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Julian of Norwich, Leonardo Boff’.

Tim Winton (photograph by Hank Kordas)As some of those names suggest, Winton is very much a man of the left, especially the environmental left. It is notable what dramatic power he conveys in his accounts of how he worked to save an environment where the boodie could come back, and how he pumped his fist silently ‘like a mad barracker’ when it did. He invests his environmental involvements with such a sense of drama and such an evocative sense of the beauties and places at risk that he will bring out the dormant greenie in anyone, because he makes his commitments so patently a blow for life (and analogous to the truth of art). The Boy Behind the Curtain might become a book of prayer and wisdom for the thousands of Australians like Ken Henry who share its passion.

A superb account of working to save the Ningaloo Reef involves a tribute to a cultivated Englishman. There is another evocative and semi-spectral story about the haunted house in Ireland in which he wrote Cloudstreet (1991) and where, later, he felt impelled to write The Riders. These essays are on a par with anything written anywhere in their play of mind and their command of tempo and rhetoric.

Winton, much a man of the beach, indicates that the sheer flow of surfing, its lack of point, makes it his meditation. He has a wonderful tribute to sharks, as well as a reverent homage to that celebrator of beautiful and terrible creatures Peter Matthiessen, who once felt the touch of the Great White. Winton also talks of the baleful irrationality of the Australian attitude to the killer shark. ‘Our demon,’ he says, ‘is silent and it swims.’

This is a rich and brilliant book with a great vibrancy and glow and wisdom. It has a sly account of the enigmas of Elizabeth Jolley and a vivid depiction of the annihilating horror when he discovered that the 1,200-page draft of Dirt Music was not working. There is also a fine sermon on the refugees: all about giving a child a stone when it asks for bread, all about driving an angel from your door when you deny pity, all about what does it profit a nation when it suffers the loss of its soul.

You would go a fair distance to find a better book of essays, separate pieces so powerful they have the ambience of a self-portrait without the burden of the search. The Boy Behind the Curtain justifies its cover’s family resemblance to Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest (1995).

The morning after the US election, Los Angeles was still. Usually a roar of noise, my city was stunned silent. As I spoke with distraught friends and colleagues, the fact that our West Hollywood polling place had been in a funeral home now seemed prescient: it felt like a wake. Donald Trump, who ran a vile campaign that – amongst innumerable barbarisms – suborned sexual assault, abused minorities, made racist claims, and was cheered by the KKK, had been elected president. As evening fell across America, protests began.

After Barack Obama’s election, I, like many progressives, hoped we had moved into a post-racial world, that Dr King’s dream had been realised and people were no longer judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. How wrong we were. How naïve. As the day went on, election demographics were released: Trump’s votes came not from the dispossessed poor but the angry white. As commentator Van Jones said: ‘This was a whitelash against a changing country ... a whitelash against a black president.’ In the following days, reports came in like long-delayed telegrams from another age: a black woman shoved from a path; a gay man beaten until he bled; Muslim women’s hijabs ripped from their heads; swastikas sprayed on walls. Racism and intolerance are alive and well, and Donald Trump has restored their ugly public voice.

You can tell a lot about a piece of writing from how it begins. For American poet Billy Collins, ‘the first line is the DNA of the poem’. With novels, as J.M. Coetzee writes, in Elizabeth Costello, ‘the problem of the opening ... is a simple bridging problem ... People solve such problems every day ... and having solved them push on.’ Coetzee’s high-wire opening barely hints at the philosophico-literary grapplings that will ensue, but in an after-the-fact reading it is all there – the structural reliance on Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ (1915), the inference that a passage through the recurring impasses of language is somehow guaranteed by death, the acknowledgment that building/writing is also always a matter of destruction.

In late 1963, Rodney Hall – an aspiring but unpublished poet and novelist – travelled through Greece’s Saronic islands with his wife and their infant daughter. Shortly after Christmas they found themselves on the island of Hydra, where they fell into the company of expatriate Australian writers George Johnston and his wife Charmian Clift, whose time on the island was drawing to a close after nearly a decade. The Johnstons, their marriage precariously holding together amid a ruinous trail of alcohol, infidelity, and public brawling, did as they had done so often before – cast aside their personal troubles and embraced their fellow Australians with immense personal warmth, hospitality, and charisma. As Hall remembers, ‘they were lovely, they were so warm, and welcoming, and funny and clever, and it was just instant friendship, we just loved them.’

By this time, a string of marginally successful novels had rendered Johnston’s finances as fragile as his marriage, but he was also armed with his justification for having taken his family from the locus of postwar literary expatriation, London, to a poorly developed corner of the Aegean. In his hands, Johnston held nothing less than his tilt at the Great Australian Novel, the book he believed would redeem his reputation and set right the personal and professional toll of his expatriation. As Hall recalls:

After we had known them five or six days, George said ‘I’ve finished this book, would you like to read it? You will have to come over to our place because I have only got two carbon copies and I can’t let either of them out of the house.’ So every morning I left Bet with the baby and I went over and sat at Charmian’s table, a big long wooden table running along one wall with a bench on one side and ladder back chairs. A lovely, beautiful kitchen. And I would read My Brother Jack, and sometimes George would come down to watch. It was a bit intimidating and he would sit at the end of the table and smoke. The table would seat sixteen or so people, and he would sit at the far end of the table pretending to read a book on his own account, but really checking on my response. And it was very exciting because certainly the first third of that book is truly wonderful, and I was able to be highly demonstrative. That went down well.

Ben Ball

I’m fresh from Hannah Kent’s compelling, humane, and utterly convincing The Good People (Picador, 10/16). Kent completely inhabits her material. In this single nineteenth–century Irish valley, she has created a whole world – indeed, a whole cosmology – that we struggle to break free from at the end of the book. The folded landscape, the terrifyingly precarious lives (especially of women), the honest engagement with folk wisdom, the cold – is it too early to think of a Kentland?

I also recently read Tara June Winch’s After the Carnage (UQP, 9/16), a remarkable collection of stories roughly a decade after her knockout début, Swallow The Air (2006). Startling without being showy, various but not tricksy, moving, fresh, and beautiful – an extremely potent voice ready to roar.

Ben Ball is Publishing Director, Penguin Books Australia.

The seminar, as far as I can remember, took place in what was then the Melbourne Teachers’ College on Grattan Street. The late-afternoon sunlight slanting through ornate windows burnt bright on a huge World War I scene on the wall behind the speakers’ table where the names of those who had made ‘the ultimate sacrifice’ were listed with melancholy precision. I remember gazing at that painting while I waited for the seminar to start. It reminded me of the ornate, scrolled, oval frame I had inherited, from which my grandfather, No. 17051 Private Alexander Murray, looked out, slightly quizzical, puzzled, his boyish face overshadowed by the military cap. On either side of the portrait hung his medals, their ribbons faded, and between them a citation in which futility grapples with dignity. ‘He whom this scroll commemorates ... passed out of the sight of men by the path of self-sacrifice ... Let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten.’

The topic of the seminar was peculiarly, if rather morbidly, appropriate – Black Armband History – of which one of the speakers, Don Watson, remarked, ‘The puerility of it has been cleverly attached to the national mood. We have to presume that is why [Prime Minister] John Howard took up the cry. None of us believes there is a single serious Australian historian whose work fits Mr Howard’s description. It is difficult to believe that the motives of the black armband school are not political, if only because their reading of history and their understanding of how it is written could not be so wrong-headed without being wilful ...’

I’ve been reading Margaret Drabble’s novels with great pleasure for most of my life, and we’ve all been getting on a bit: Drabble, me, her readers, her characters. So I suppose it was inevitable that we would get to a novel about old age and death. When I discovered that these were indeed the subjects of her eighteenth novel, The Dark Flood Rises, and saw the sinister black-lace design on the cover (is that a devil face?), I steeled myself for a grim read. But it isn’t grim at all.

Grim things certainly happen: infirmity and illness, pain and loss of faculties, grief and loneliness. By the end, some of the people we have come to know intimately are no longer in this world. But on the whole, Drabble’s people are going gently into that good night. Some of them seem to be having quite a good time, considering.

Novels about old people just being old are surprisingly rare. The aged tend to turn up as parents or grandparents of the main characters. If they take centre stage, like Peter Carey’s impossibly ancient Illywhacker, they often do so in order to look back at times when they were young. This is strange when you consider how many well-regarded novelists are hitting their sixties and seventies (Drabble is seventy-seven), and indeed how many of their baby boomer readers are in or approaching the same age bracket. Are we too squeamish to confront the twilight years? Do we believe they are static, dull, the domain of boring old farts?

The record for the largest number of Miles Franklin Literary Awards ever won is jointly held by Tim Winton and Thea Astley, with four wins each. It may seem odd that with three of those already behind her, Astley should also have won the Patrick White Award in 1989 for ‘a writer who has been highly creative over a long period but has not necessarily received adequate recognition’. But, as David Carter wrote in an essay for ABR (December 2012–January 2013), the terms of the award are more complex than that: ‘The terms do state that the Award is for “an author who has already made a contribution to Australian literature by the writing ... of published novels, short stories, poetry and/or plays”, with the purpose of encouraging the author “to continue to write such works for publication”.’

Susan Sheridan argues in her new book that Astley’s fiction steadily increased in both depth and complexity over her long career, and that her last six novels – those published from 1986 onwards – were her best. If this is the case, then that Patrick White Award did exactly what it was designed to do – despite the fact that on winning it, Astley herself, with a characteristic mix of self-deprecation, sharpness of tongue, and an Eeyore-like world view, dismissed it as the prize ‘for people who fail’.

You can judge this memoir by its poignant cover. It shows a picture of the author taken in 1966 when he was eight or nine years old. Behind him is one of the accessories of the baby boomer period, a Volkswagen. The Beetle is parked near long grass, redolent of Melbourne’s outer suburban fringe, an area that features prominently in Shaun Carney’s account of his origins. Frankston and Carrum Downs are the heartland of this book.

In the photo, young Shaun Carney looks stiff and uncomfortable. Jimmy, his father, embraces him with one arm. Despite the smile on his face, Jimmy seems awkward. His eyes have nowhere to focus. Jimmy was a chain smoker and heavy drinker; he tried to maintain simultaneous relationships with different women. By the time Shaun started school at the age of four, Jimmy ‘was always coming up with reasons not to be around’. In the photo, the cigarette in Jimmy’s right hand is beautifully balanced by a watch on his son’s wrist. That contrast encapsulates an essential difference between the two men. Shaun Carney will tell us that he worked at The Age for twenty-six years, six months, and twenty-eight days. There is a strong sense in this book of the passing of time.

Songs are of great importance to the Dinka people of South Sudan. ‘They’re our avatars, and our biographies. They precede us, introduce us, and live on after we die,’ writes the refugee advocate, Archibald muse, and NSW Australian of the Year for 2017, Deng Thiak Adut. His memoir, Songs of a War Boy, serves as a profound if disturbing ballad to his tragedies and triumphs.

After the prolonged débâcle following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, events in the Middle East in late 2010 and early 2011 seemed to be taking a turn for the better. The ‘Arab street’ had found its voice and democracy, we were led to believe, was on the march. Despite the setbacks that followed 9/11, perhaps Francis Fukuyama’s optimistic liberal triumphalism concerning the ‘end of history’ had been right all along?

By 2013 the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, or Da’esh) had put the final nail in the coffin of liberal triumphalism and stunned the world with its military successes. From relative obscurity, it had taken over leadership of the global jihadist movement from Al Qaeda, as well as controlling large tracts of territory in Iraq and Syria, an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom. All of this it had achieved with an army estimated to number no more than 30,000 combatants. What explains the emergence of ISIS, and how has it managed to position itself so effectively at the forefront of the global jihadist movement?

Empires of a thousand years’ duration are not common in the history of the world. Adolf Hitler’s dream of a thousand-year Reich evaporated after little more than a decade, and Napoleon’s conquests were not much more lasting. Even the Roman Empire, depending on the dates we set for its beginning and ending, succumbed to internal decline and barbarian invasion after some six or seven hundred years. Or did it? The reality is more complicated, for we tend to forget that its eastern half held out for almost exactly a millennium longer, against repeated and fierce military assaults, until it was finally overwhelmed by the Ottomans in 1453.

Perhaps more shadowy still to most readers, in spite of being closer to home in Europe itself, also lasting a thousand years and only ending two hundred years ago – with a coda running up to Word War I – is the successor entity known as the Holy Roman Empire. We recall Charlemagne from history lessons at school; from art history we may know Titian’s portrait of Charles V; we travel to Palermo and hear about Frederick II; we are in Frankfurt or Nuremberg and are told about Electors and the Imperial Diet; we even probably recall that the House of Windsor were once the Electors of Hanover, without quite knowing what that means.

The story of Robinson Crusoe, penned by Daniel Defoe in 1719, is one those remarkable books that created a new genre. The ‘Robinsonade’ or castaway story became one of the most popular forms of adventure novel, inspiring a host of famous ‘imitators’: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide (1894), R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858), and Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island (1874). Defoe’s tale also inspired true adventure. Matthew Flinders was ‘induced to go to sea against the wishes of my friends from reading Robinson Crusoe’. In the sizeable shipboard library of French explorer Lapérouse, there was only one novel: Robinson Crusoe.

The study of Defoe and the Robinsonades is similarly vast. First-year courses devote entire semesters to analysis of the novel. The list of books published about Defoe, his famous novel, and his inspiration Alexander Selkirk, is astounding, and the study of the book’s impact on exploration history is in itself quite significant. Just recently, Australian academic Karen Dowling published the excellent Restless Men: Masculinity and Robinson Crusoe, 1788–1840 (2014), which explores the resonance the famous novel generated for generations of explorers and immigrants. Crusoe’s Island: A rich and curious history of pirates, castaways and madness, by naval historian Andrew Lambert, appears to follow similar territory, exploring the impact that ‘the island of Robinson Crusoe’ had on ‘our imagination and culture’.

A Tear in the Soul is a fine example of creative non-fiction that unfolds a personal story but also advances our knowledge of Australian society, past and present. It is a nuanced contribution to the growing body of literature in which contemporary non-Indigenous Australians attempt to make sense of the history of white settlement and take responsibility for our own complicity in the past and current treatment of Indigenous peoples. In combining a personal quest to reconnect to her past with an exploration of 1960s Kalgoorlie and a moral self-examination, Webster has written a book in which story and idea interweave to engage and move us, even while we are forced to confront disturbing material.

Webster was born in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, her father and grandfather both local doctors. When she started school in the 1960s, she met Aboriginal children from the nearby Kurrawang Mission, who, she assumed, were orphans happily living in a caring community. She became particularly friendly with Bronwyn, who spent a summer holiday with Webster’s family in Esperance, and took a shine to a boy called Tony. Forty years later, a discussion with colleagues triggers a return to Western Australia to track down her friends. She is able to find them only after meeting Gregory Ugle, Tony’s brother, who has self-published a story about his years at Kurrawang.

A horizontal twister, but none of the dramatic life
and drop of hellraiser rides. Sedate, but vertiginous
enough to rearrange conceptions, open perceptions
to a very different York – those eucalypt canopies
a blur of recognition shifting the boundaries

‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant,’ wrote Emily Dickinson. In Moonglow, his latest novel, Michael Chabon follows Dickinson’s directive. This shape-shifting novel masquerades at times as a memoir and at others as a biography of the author’s grandmother and, more frequently, of his grandfather. At the centre of this family saga that takes us through much of the American Century, we discover the complexities of that man, an engineer, World War II veteran, and occasional romantic figure who often lives inside the grey areas of the law.

When the novel begins, the narrator, like Chabon himself, has launched a promising literary career. Chabon’s coming-of-age novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), earned its twenty-five-year-old author praise as the next J.D. Salinger. Following that début, Chabon hopscotched between successes. His novels include Wonder Boys (1995), the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007). In Moonglow, he returns to the early days of a life that has become one of the most successful in contemporary American literature.

Given the Australian propensity for travel, it is odd that the global wanderings of our citizens are not much explored in literary fiction, which is still in the anguished throes of self-examination, arguably stuck in a loop. How refreshing, then, to read Anthony Macris’s fourth book, Inexperience and Other Stories, a short volume which drops the reader into the discomfiting world of an Australian couple overseas.

Our unnamed narrator and his wife, Carol, are determined not to fall into the classic European tourist traps. Fed up with Australia’s ‘shabby modernity’, they arrive in Madrid, which turns out to be not nearly as glamorous as they imagined. After an embarrassing incident the couple decamp to Toledo, where they intend to view several masterpieces by El Greco. It does not take long for cracks to appear in their relationship. This leads to separation and a complete breakdown of their European adventure.

Much has been made of the fact that Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil is Melina Marchetta’s first adult novel. Marchetta is best known for her Young Adult titles, which include Looking for Alibrandi, Saving Francesca, and On the Jellicoe Road lively, popular works about the intense lives and tribulations of teenagers and their families, often in a cross-cultural (Italian–Australian) context. Having also ventured successfully into fantasy, here she moves into crime drama. This genre provides a fast-paced, incident-packed, and undemanding reading experience. Markus Zusak, author of The Book Thief, who provides an endorsement for this book, is, along with Maureen McCarthy, Marchetta, and other ostensibly YA writers, widely read by adults. Marchetta is not straying far from her devoted audience.

Of Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil, one reviewer noted that ‘reading the whole thing in a searing rush of pages in one sitting is irresistible’. The complex, fast-moving plot, Marchetta’s vivid evocation of her characters, and her perfect ear for dialogue are seductive. Alongside pace and effective character-building, another hallmark of compelling crime fiction is the location of the action in a cultural or political setting and tapping into contemporary anxieties. Here we have jittery British and French societies ambivalent about immigration and security, a context of terrorist bombings past and present, racial profiling by police, and characters of Middle Eastern origins whose complex family connections and loyalties cross borders and generations. With action racing between France and Britain, you have a heady brew and an immersive reading experience.

The village of Tierra de Chá in Cristina Sánchez-Andrade’s novel The Winterlings feels a bit like Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo, without the magic realism. It is a small community riddled with family secrets, desiccated aspirations, incest, and regrets. Located in Galicia, in north-western Spain, Tierra de Chá is full of succulent characters. There is Little Ramón, the sailor who was breastfed until the age of twelve. Mr Tenderlove makes a living as a ‘dental mechanic’, fashioning dentures from the teeth of cadavers, and dresses in drag in the privacy of his boudoir. There once was a lunatic who used to believe he was a chicken, and did so with such fervour that he started laying eggs, but no one knows where he is anymore.

In 1934, Lucia Joyce, then in her late twenties, entered analysis with Carl Jung, at the behest of her father, James Joyce. She had been in and out of psychiatric care for several years, but it was still not clear exactly what was wrong with her – if anything. A few years earlier, as a dancer in the Isadora Duncan style, she had been thought to have a genius akin to her father’s. Her biographer, Carol Loeb Shloss, considers that the arts of father and daughter were connected: that Lucia embodied the fluid self Joyce so painstakingly constructed in his fiction. Yet here was Joyce handing his beloved daughter over to a man who was openly hostile to Joyce’s literary experiments, which he saw as an attack on sanity.

Quicksilver begins in magniloquence, like the prophet Isaiah. It was the cold midwinter season, we are told, when Nicolas Rothwell began his days of journeying, driving west from Papunya in the Northern Territory towards Marble Bar in Western Australia. ‘The roads were empty: for the best part of a week I saw no trace of man and his works.’ As he drove, he thought about the last expedition of Colonel Warburton, the first European explorer to cross the continent west from the centre. He remembered how Warburton, after eight months labouring through the Great Sandy Desert, camped by the dry bed of the Oakover River and there witnessed a marvel beyond all expectation. ‘To our great surprise,’ Warburton wrote in his diary, ‘we were awakened at 3am by the roaring of running water.’ In the morning, they discovered that the landscape had been transformed by a fast-moving flood some 300 metres wide. For in the wilderness shall waters break out, said the prophet, and streams in the desert.

Quicksilver is a book about the sacred and its relationship to the world of the profane. It is a collection of six essays exploring the many dim passages and hidden transits between the human world, the world of nature, and the mysteries of whatever lies beyond. Some of these essays have appeared before, but here they are allowed to expand and grow, sprawl and cascade.

Latin America – the term – is an invention of a would-be emperor of Mexico, French in origin, trying in vain to strengthen the imperial project through a link to a Latinate origin, including and privileging the language and culture of the romance languages and excluding the Anglophone in the quest for colonial pre-eminence. However, long before the empire of Napoleon III attempted to make this claim the New World was being invented through the tales of mythical beasts, Amazons, and the unfathomable riches of El Dorado.

These inventions have been, and continue to be, reworked. First, through the lens of colonialism, then the foundational fictions of the post-independence era. This was closely followed by the reinvention of these new nations from within, shaped by the weight of their European heritage, while sometimes drawing on the supposedly superior traits of the creole élites, and occasionally elements of indigenous culture. In the early part of the twentieth century, this reinvention was attempted via the poetic and aesthetic movements seeking to create and express an authentic national culture grounded in what many have termed a fantastical reality and shaped through a cannibalistic approach to the European vanguards. For many intellectuals and theorists, the attempts by the countries of Latin America to define themselves as modern nations exemplified a search for modernity in the absence of modernisation. In Latin American Cinema: A comparative history, Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez examines the cinematic invention of Latin America and its interplay with the multiplicity of modernities encompassed in the region.

A century before Beatlemania there was Lisztomania. The symptoms were similar: fans driven to near delirium by their proximity to their musical idols, this mass hysteria finding involuntary physical release during performances. The Beatles may have been mobbed during their 1964 American tour, but Liszt left Berlin in March 1842 ‘not like a king, but as a king’, as one contemporary put it: in a carriage drawn by six white horses, surrounded by adoring crowds. Ken Russell tapped into the similarities between Liszt and contemporary rock idols in his marvellously extravagant film Lisztomania (1975), featuring The Who’s Roger Daltrey in glam rock outfits as Liszt (and with a brief cameo from Ringo Starr as the pope). Even with all its wilful anachronisms, this film conveys something of the mesmerising effect Liszt had on audiences throughout Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Oliver Hilmes is the latest biographer to try to capture in more sober prose the extravagance and variety of Liszt’s life. The subtitle of the English translation – Musician, Celebrity, Superstar – suggests a focus on the glamorous external aspects of his subject’s life, and Hilmes certainly has an eye for the sensational. Liszt’s more scandalous amours are covered in detail: among them Agnes Street-Klindworth, whom Hilmes describes as ‘the spy in lace petticoats’; and the ‘Cossack countess’ Olga Janina, who was neither of those things, but who did brandish a revolver at Liszt and pretend to take poison in his presence.

When you join the Church of Scientology, you sign a contract for a billion years. You are then audited with the help of a machine called an ‘E Meter’, which helps uncover areas of conflict and blockages in your current life and previous ones. The goal, after undergoing an intensive and expensive course of study into the theories and practice of the Church’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, is to go ‘clear’. This state, one of utmost analytical clarity, gives one the ability to achieve goals impossible in a ‘pre-clear’ state. Each step costs thousands of dollars, but the rewards, say adherents, are worth it. Alongside the anonymous rank and file, Scientology can count many celebrities among its present or former members. These include John Travolta, Tom Cruise and (formerly) Nicole Kidman, James Packer, and Australian rugby league stars Joe Reaiche and Pat Jarvis.

So how did Hubbard, a small-time science fiction writer, end up as a man of such influence? His Californian roommate from the 1940s, newspaperman Nieson Himmel, is quoted as saying, ‘whenever [Hubbard] was talking about being hard up, he often used to say that he thought the easiest way to make money would be to start a religion’. At that point, Hubbard – depressed and dabbling in occultism – was on a veteran’s pension from the US Navy.

There have been popular accounts of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, especially Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998) and The Meaning of Everything (2003), and there have been more scholarly accounts, such as Charlotte Brewer’s Treasure-House of the Language: The Living OED (2007). Peter Gilliver’s 642-page The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary is firmly anchored in the scholarly tradition, as it documents the history of the OED project from brief mentions of the desirability of a new dictionary in the records of meetings of the Philological Society in the 1840s, through to the OED’s present online,and constantly changing third edition.

The first half of the book deals with the first edition and its supplement (1861–1933), focusing on James Murray as chief editor, and the three other editors appointed later to assist him: Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and Charles Onions. The second half of the book (1935 to the present) focuses on the four supplements edited by Robert Burchfield, the 1989 second edition (amalgamating, in electronic form, the text of the first edition with the supplements) by Edmund Weiner and John Simpson, and the start of the third edition under the editorship of John Simpson.

Conventional wisdom has it that Ivan Pavlov made dogs salivate to the sound of a bell, discovered the conditioned reflex, and laid the foundations for behaviourism, an austere creed that ruled the mind to be off limits for science. Almost all of this is false. Pavlov’s bell was in fact a sophisticated adjustable buzzer. The ‘conditioned reflex’ is a mistranslation: reflexes are instead ‘conditional’, occurring only under certain conditions. Pavlov, no behaviourist, saw his scientific work as a pathway to understanding ‘our consciousness and its torments’. His goal was not to reduce mind to mechanism but to use the tools of digestive physiology to comprehend the complexity of psychological functions and individuality. As the distinguished medical historian Daniel Todes writes in this superb biography, the salivary glands were to Pavlov a window into the psyche.

The only correct feature of the popular image of Pavlov is the iconic dogs. He dabbled in other creatures during his long career, including a disastrous involvement with mice and a more positive experience with a pair of chimpanzees. At one point he resisted a recommendation from Alfred Nobel to study giraffes. But Pavlov always returned to his faithful dogs, which he regarded with unrestrained anthropomorphism. As Todes astutely notes, Pavlov had ‘a long-standing practice of interpreting dogs as people and people as dogs’. A keen student of canine temperament, he observed that dogs came in many distinct ‘nervous types’, but they were all members of a species that was uniquely suited to his mode of experimentation.

Most scientists are writers. Notwithstanding the distortions induced by the ‘publish or perish’ imperative of funding agencies and academic appointment committees, the publication of original research is fundamental to the scientific process. Depending on the field, a successful scientist may write a hundred or more publications over his or her career. In terms of sheer numbers of words, this is equivalent to two or three full-length novels.

The best Australian science is published in a daunting array of international journals, mostly discipline-specific, but some, such as Nature and Science, cover the whole scientific enterprise. So far in 2016, more than 100 articles with Australian co-authors have appeared in Nature, and around sixty in Science. Modern science is highly collaborative, and not all co-authors necessarily end up with text in the final articles. Nevertheless, this output represents a significant contribution to the leading edge of scientific literature.

Philosophers do not have the best track record as parents. Plato seemed to entertain the idea that children should be raised by the state. Rousseau abandoned all five of his children to an orphanage. There is a rumour that Descartes used to travel with a life-sized mechanical doll that he named after his daughter. Wittgenstein was encouraged to move on from his brief career as a primary school teacher in rural Austria after it was discovered that he would sometimes pull the children’s hair out if they were particularly bad at mathematics.

Alison Gopnik, a philosopher and psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has been working hard to correct this situation. Her latest book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, is a deeply researched enquiry into the world of childhood, particularly the connection between child and adult that we have come to call ‘parenting.’

One way to summarise Gopnik’s overall point is to notice something funny about the word ‘parent’. It has become a verb. This is odd, since words that denote similar relationships don’t shift so happily into verbs. We don’t really friend our friends, or spouse our spouses, or daughter our parents. But in recent years, Gopnik suggests, we have learned to parent our kids. In the process, we have become increasingly anxious about whether we are doing it right. The shift here is a transition from a kind of relationship to a kind of work. The upshot is that it is now all too easy to worry about our parenting techniques, when this should be as odd as worrying about our spousing or friending techniques. While there are certainly ways to wonder whether we are being good friends or good spouses, no other relationship has created a behemoth quite like the parenting industry. This literature is heavily prescriptive, filled with rules, activities, and plans that promise to transform parents into experts at what now seems to be a necessary and vital skill: parenting.

Tony Garnett, one of the most respected figures in British television drama, is also one of its most reclusive. Most people these days have almost certainly never heard of him, or, if they have, probably think he is a distant relation of Alf Garnett, of Till Death Us Do Part fame.

Even though the cantankerous Alf was a fictional character (played by the great, late Warren Mitchell), there is a slight connection between place and time. Both Alf and Tony Garnett were creatures of BBC Television in the monochromatic 1960s. While Alf made Britain shudder with his crude pre-Trumpist views that embraced racism and sexism, Tony, a producer who joined the BBC fresh from university, made Britain think hard about social realism. He was one of that generation of so-called radical creators who tackled the economic and social issues of the day, highlighting endemic problems such as housing, child care, police corruption, and psychiatric cruelty.

Through the use of such formidable directors such as Ken Loach, Garnett was responsible for a string of social-realistic documentary-dramas, all shot on grainy film stock and always on location, the most famous of which were Cathy Come Home (1966) and Up the Junction (1968). Garnett had a thirteen-year association with Loach (‘We were joined at the hip,’ Garnett recalls), which also resulted in the feature film Kes (1969) about a young Yorkshire lad who befriends a kestrel. It nearly didn’t get made, when a financier, turning it down, said, ‘Sorry, not for us. Wrong kind of bird.’

Readers who expect to be treated with gentlemanly courtesy have always found D. H. Lawrence rough going. His explicit fictional representations of sex and his anti-war diatribes were widely condemned in his lifetime, and his novels were duly censored or withdrawn from sale in Britain and beyond. Lawrence’s prose style – lyrical and sensuous one moment, brusque and coarse the next – can be as unsettling as his ideas, extreme as they are strange and seemingly liberated from any wariness about self-contradiction. Lawrence gave full expression to deeply misanthropic moods in person and in writing, which can make him seem misogynist, homophobic, racist, classist, treacherous, or fascistic to those who are on the lookout for such things. A tender interest in all kinds of people and places is equally evident, but that is, naturally, less notable when considering a writer whose fiction carries the mark of being included in F.R. Leavis’s ‘great tradition’. Canonisation has made a literary outsider who enjoyed sparse approval in his lifetime seem symptomatic of the shortcomings of a culture that he himself found wanting.

It is easy to read the attitudes of Lawrence’s flawed and limited male characters as his own, his representations of flawed and limited women as demeaning, and his portraits of flawed and limited indigenous characters as racist. But perhaps it is fairer to view them as the product of a flawed and limited writer who strove to depict and invigorate a culture that seemed, to him, to be flawed and limited.

Ellen van Neerven, Joel Deane, and Mike Ladd present poems about journeys, recovery, and healing, from comfort food to the experience of a stroke, within overlapping landscapes as palimpsests for their respective pathways.

Reciprocity through feeding runs through Ellen van Neerven’s first collection (Comfort Food, University of Queensland Press, $24.95 pb, 104 pp, 9780702254055) – reciprocity within and without family. Staples like bread and noodles bring joy and contact through breaking and sharing. The fibrous texture of mango cheeks paired with a found object – half a tennis ball – correlates to childhood; the softness of pumpkin scones and familial Dutch comfort food represent togetherness and belonging, expressing van Neerven’s mixed Mununjali and European heritage.

Edgier correspondences are found in the elders drying out kangaroo tails on a wire fence crossed by settler lines imposed on country. These create their own twisted hieroglyphics, and ‘out here there’s reading to be done’ in order ‘to be a piece in time / not a timeline / or a picket in a fence’. An old neighbour attracts animals, including ‘a tree snake hung with his belts’ – juxtaposed skins of the living and dead. A woman with cancer remembers ‘that day she found a snakeskin by the river / they say grief infiltrates strange locations / usually ties itself around your lungs like rubber bands’. Such lines within the body and spanning country are spun out deftly through the text.

For the novice, Alexander Pope’s couplets can seem a numbing wilderness of equipoise – rhyme balanced against rhyme, half lines balanced around the caesura, regular iambs marching on to the end of pentametrical time (alternatively ‘to the edge of doom’). With a bit of experience as a reader, however, it is the wrought tension of Pope’s couplets that fascinates. The balance is only ever perilously achieved in a world constantly tending to chaos.

The most quotable phrases in his philosophical poem from 1734, An Essay on Man (here republished in an elegant and scholarly edition by Tom Jones), seem to bespeak bewigged Enlightenment complacency: ‘vindicate the ways of God to Man’; ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’; ‘my guide, philosopher, and friend’; and, no less than thrice, ‘Whatever is, is right’. It sounds pompous, doesn’t it? However, this is exactly like the Shakespeare game. The most quotable quotes get taken out of a vexed context that gives them quite a different charge. ‘To thine own self be true’, says Polonius to his son Laertes in Hamlet, but it must follow, as the night the day, that Polonius is a posturing hypocrite whose next deed is to send a spy after his son to France, and who subsequently dies of stab wounds partly consequent on his enthusiasm for pimping his daughter to the prince. Google Images tells me that ‘to thine own self be true’ is a popular tattoo. I hope they wear it ironically.

Fifty years ago, Brian Scheer, a tall, sinewy Imperials fast bowler, thrilled a handful of boys by driving bowlers of all descriptions straight over their heads, depositing their deliveries in clumps of thick weeds on a low hill at the northern end of the Murray Bridge High School No. 2 Oval. Imps practised on Thursday evenings, and Scheer was the regular opening bowler in B grade, with just the occasional appearance in the first eleven. He was a useful batsman and made the odd twenty or thirty in matches, but the glory of his strokes, which resembled majestic seven irons by their steepling trajectory, was reserved for practice. I remember he would point his left toe high down the wicket, raise his arms shoulder high, his bat would point vertically skyward and his swing would carry through freely like a golf stroke to its completion. If the Murray Valley Standard had ever sent a photographer to Imps practice sessions or a keen amateur snapper had been on hand, one or the other might have captured something special, a small-town version of Victor Trumper’s ‘Jumping Out to Drive’.

At the end of his new book, Stroke of Genius, Gideon Haigh writes ‘that no great batsman has ever had a more faithful partner than Victor Trumper his photographer [George Beldam]’, because the man is epitomised by the image Beldam took at London’s Kennington Oval in 1905. Words failed to convey an adequate impression of his play. The photo is important in defining distinctions in cricket and particularly batting: art versus science; function versus form; how versus how many; a Golden Age of romance and aesthetics versus industry, productivity, and measurement. Interestingly, Haigh also suggests that in the present visual century Beldam’s picture ‘has secured for Trumper a sizeable corner, while of Bradman there exists no single, quintessential image’. Has art triumphed?

Subhi lives with Maa and his older sister Queeny in ‘Family Three’, hoping that the ‘Night Sea’ will bring his Ba back to them. Born in detention to his Rohingya mother after she arrived illegally in Australia, his friend Eli and a kindly ‘Jacket’ make his life one of fitful pleasures amid the uncertainties of camp life. On the other side of the fence, in the nearby community, Jimmie feels besieged by grief following her mother’s death. She needs the comfort of reliving her mother’s stories, which are kept in a treasured book. A mostly absent father and an uncaring brother won’t share them with her; so, since she can’t read her, the stories are lost to her as well. These unlikely individuals meet at a ‘squeezeway’ in the wire, and their mutual needs help them to escape their separate worlds, for a time.

Why do you write?

Because I have something to say – and not just to one person, but to as many people as I can reach. And when the writing goes well, I enjoy doing it.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes.

Where are you happiest?

Where? I’m happy when I’ve done something well, whether it’s writing, giving a talk, or organising an event. There is no particular place where that occurs. If you want particular places, it would have to be a different kind of happiness, such as I might feel on a mountaintop, looking out at the view, or at the beach, catching a

CALIBRE ESSAY PRIZE

For the eleventh year in a row, we seek entries in the Calibre Essay Prize – the country’s premier prize for an unpublished non-fiction essay. Calibre is now worth a total of $7,500. The winner will receive $5,000; the runner-up, $2,500. Both essays will appear in ABR. Once again, Calibre is open to anyone writing in English around the world. We recommend the quick, inexpensive online entry system. Guidelines and the entry form are available on our website. Entries will close on 15 March 2017.

All previous Calibre-winning essays are available online, including Michael Winkler’s ‘The Great Red Whale’, which has just been reproduced in The Best Australian Essays 2016, edited by Geordie Williamson. These essays have contributed to a major rejuvenation of the essay form. As always, we thank Colin Golvan QC (Chair of ABR) for his generous support for Calibre.

ANTHOLOGIES GALORE

It’s a heady time for anthology fetishists and a propitious one for Australian poets, with several anthologies appearing in recent weeks. Poets always crave a guernsey in Black Inc.’s The Best Australian Poems, and this year Sarah Holland-Batt (winner of the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for poetry) has chosen works by 108 poets, including (drum roll) a dozen that were first published by ABR. Many of these appeared in our online national project, States of Poetry.

Acts of anthologising are ambitious (risky, some might say). There is a particularly expansive new volume from Puncher & Wattmann: Contemporary Australian Poetry, edited by Martin Langford, Judith Beveridge, Judy Johnson, and David Musgrave. There are 239 poets and more than 500 poems. The publisher makes considerable claims for our national poetry: ‘While no one was looking, our poetry has become too large for the space set aside for it, too important to be quiet, and too insistent to be ignored. It has evolved into one of our country’s greatest cultural achievements.’

Launching the book in Sydney, David Malouf said: ‘Poetry really is, at the moment, the most flourishing of the literary arts in Australia: much more interesting and much more sure of itself, it seems to me, than the novel or any kind of prose.’

Other anthologies worth noting are Bonny Cassidy and Jessica L. Wilkinson’s Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter Publishers), John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan’s The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry, and Jamie Grant’s 100 Australian Poems You Need to Know (Hardie Grant Books).

VALE LEONARD COHEN

Canadian poet, novelist, and singer–songwriter Leonard Cohen died on 7 November at the age of eighty-two. A revered musical figure, he was best known for exploring themes of religion, politics, and personal relationships through his spoken-word styled song.

Cohen lived for many years on the ‘amphitheatric’ island of Hydra. He crops up in Paul Genoni’s article ('Hydra as intimate theatre'), part of the circle of artists and expatriates that surrounded Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift on the Greek island. Cohen described the ‘glorious setting at Hydra’ as a youthful idyll: ‘Everybody was beautiful and young and full of talent and covered with a gold dust.’ It was there that he met one of his many paramours, Marianne Ihlen, who was once prophetically told that she was ‘going to meet a man who speaks with a tongue of gold’.

THE AGE OF SCORN

Clearly, after the egregious US presidential election, we can now dub this The Age of Scorn. How fitting it was to receive a publication titled Scorn: The wittiest and wickedest insults in human history (Profile Books, $24.99 hb, 9781781257296). Matthew Parris, the editor, once served as a British MP, so he should know a thing or two about vituperation.

All our favourites are there, including Gore Vidal on Ronald Reagan (‘A triumph of the embalmer’s art’), Tom Lehrer on Dr Kissinger (‘Satire died the day they gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize. There are no jokes left after that’), and Nancy on Ronald Reagan (‘He doesn’t make snap decisions but he doesn’t overthink either’). The aperçus of Donald Trump are not represented, but, following his elevation to the (do not adjust your set) White House, we can doubtless look forward to an appendix in the next edition.

Australia, as in most British anthologies, is poorly represented, but at least Lady Diana visited the place and dispensed loving cheer to a one-armed man: ‘My, you must have fun chasing the soap around the bath.’

As ever, Aristophanes should have the last word: ‘Under every stone lurks a politician.’

TRANSNATIONAL LITERATURE

Flinders University has published a bumper November issue of its free online journal Transnational Literature. The current issue contains essays, reviews, stories, and poetry dealing with themes of cross-cultural interaction from sixty residents of fifteen countries. Gillian Dooley is the general editor, and its book reviews editor is Patrick Allington. Contributors to this issue include David Adès, Claire Gaskin, and Satendra Nandan.

NEW ABR SURVEY

We love hearing from our readers, and surveys help us to improve the magazine and to augment its appeal to new readers and advertisers. This month we’re conducting a new online survey aimed at gaining a more accurate profile of our readers. This survey will be totally anonymous – unless you wish to be in the running for one of our juicy prizes (in which case we will need your name and email address). The survey is now available on our website.

FREE GIFT SUBSCRIPTION

There’s still time to give a friend a six-month subscription to ABR (print or online). New and renewing subscribers can do so up until 31 December. You can qualify for this special offer by renewing your current subscription even before it is due to lapse. Why not introduce a young reader or writer to ABR?

All you have to do is fill in the back of the flysheet that accompanies this issue, or contact us on (03) 9699 8822 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (quoting your subscriber number please). We will contact the nominated recipient to establish whether he or she wants the print edition or ABR Online (thus we will need the recipient’s email address). Terms and conditions apply.

Parallel importation

Dear Editor,
I’d like to thank Colin Golvan QC for his intelligent, articulate, and well-argued response to the Productivity Commission report’s proposed changes to parallel importations and fair use, published as both a podcast and a brief commentary by ABR (November 2016).

These are big issues for Australian authors and illustrators, such as myself, and for the many Australians who value local literary culture and a thriving book industry. It’s so helpful to have an intellectual property and trade practices expert such as Colin Golvan contribute meaningfully to the public debate.

Julienne van Loon, RMIT University, Melbourne

Compasses and radar screens

Dear Editor,
You are not the only reviewer/commentator who has described the opening projection in the Met’s production of Tristan und Isolde (Arts Update) as a compass or a ‘huge nautical compass’. However, it is not a compass. It is a radar screen; a huge, not necessarily nautical, radar screen. Of course, neither a radar screen nor a Zippo lighter was in existence in Wagner’s time, much less in the times of Tristan und Isolde, but, these days, that is neither here nor there.

Let’s hear it for ‘our’ Stuart Skelton!

Minnie Biggs, Kurrajong, NSW

I stand encompassed. Ed.

Bingo!

Dear Editor,
In July 1963, as an eighteen-year-old student travelling from New York to France with my family on board the SS United States, I was paired with Helena Rubinstein for several games of bingo. Although she was travelling under a pseudonym, I recognised her immediately. She was a delight throughout our games. I knew she was ‘of a certain age’ (ninety then), but she looked marvellous. Her coal-black hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and her face was unwrinkled; only her hands, with rings on every finger and looking like talons, gave her age away. Graham Sutherland’s portrait (whose acquisition by the National Portrait Gallery Fiona Gruber writes about in Arts Update), certainly captures the woman with whom I spent an afternoon.

David Palmer (online comment)

Belvoir renaissance?

Dear Editor,
When I saw the production of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer at Belvoir St Theatre (which Ian Dickson reviewed for Arts Update), Colin Friels’s performance was riveting: multi-layered, complex, mesmerising – and in perfect balance with those of Alison Whyte and Pip Miller. It’s another hit for Belvoir following the very different but equally brilliant The Drover’s Wife. One hopes that both these productions will have another life for the sake of those who failed to get a seat this time around.

Is this the long-awaited Belvoir renaissance?

Gil Appleton (online comment)

The MTC will present the Belvoir production, with the same cast, in March 2017. Ed.