A few years ago, conservatives in Australia supported a push to get courses on Western Civilisation into universities, with generous funding from the Ramsay Foundation. They wished to combat what they saw as an overemphasis on the evils of colonialism and postcolonial exploitation and to reinstate a history proclaiming the benefits of European culture. At first glance, Roeck’s book matches this agenda. It retells, in updated form, the grand narrative of a sublime ancient Greek culture – described as ‘an unparalleled achievement of the human mind’ – transmitted by the Romans, then rediscovered and enhanced by the Renaissance, that ultimately brought the benefits of democracy and European science to the world. Its heroes (the word recurs repeatedly) are male thinkers, artists, and inventors, and its ‘modernity’ is exclusively European.

Adorning the cover of The Wurrumbar, a début novel by William J. Byrne, is a green and brown yabby, an Australian freshwater crustacean; it emerges from slimy brown water and is at once sinister and potentially delicious. I remember catching them in much the same way as the young protagonist does in the novel, crouching by a clear pond in the bush with some bloody meat in a paper bag ready to tie on to a piece of string and catch a big fat yabby to boil in a billy on a fire. In some ways, this novel captures parts of my life, and for that reason it calls to my heart and no doubt conjures childhood memories for countless older readers.

I was weaned on Blackadder. It was a series that hit its comedy straps when Ben Elton came on board for the 1986 second season to begin his immensely fruitful collaboration with Richard Curtis. Blackadder played a similar role in my childhood to Horrible Histories in the next generation. Its third season should probably take at least partial blame for the decades I spent studying Britain’s Georgian decades.

In Carralon Ridge, a fictional, dilapidated town in New South Wales, Sam Crowley goes missing on the day of his twenty-first birthday. Every year, the community comes together for an annual vigil, but among the mourners there may be someone who knows what happened. In the background, the incessant activity of a nearby open-cut coal mine threatens the very existence of the village.

In a recent interview published in ABR (November 2025), Melissa Lucashenko was asked what qualities she looks for in critics and editors. ‘Language that I can understand without needing a thesaurus,’ she responded. ‘Some points of connection, regardless of how far apart our cultures of origin might be.’ This collection of twenty non-fiction pieces written over two decades draws together a selection of keynote addresses, feature articles, radio presentations, speeches, and reviews, many previously unpublished. These pieces reflect on her career as a writer, a public intellectual, and the author of celebrated novels; Too Much Lip won the Miles Franklin Award in 2019 and her historical novel Edenglassie has won a series of prestigious awards since its publication in 2023. The pieces in this collection are also ‘personal’. The heron that features on the hardcover design of this collection gestures to Lucashenko’s totem, and we follow its tracks across the page.

Having vivisected Mr. Vowles’s novel in the August issue of ABR, I now feel compelled to defend it. David Bradford’s complaint in his letter, ‘An utterly implausible sauna scene’ (ABR, October 2025), is that Our New Gods is inaccurate and ‘defamatory of the gay community’. The first charge is false: Vowles’s setting is also my setting, and I think he captures Melbourne’s queer scene with forensic accuracy. As for the second charge, maybe the letter writer should familiarise himself with the conventions of psychological thrillers, melodramas, and noir fiction. Our New Gods isn’t a Pride pamphlet that seeks the most flattering presentation of the queer community. Above all, Vowles wants to entertain; to press his reader’s nose up against the glass: here, inside, are all the beautiful, amoral people, the bad people behaving badly, and what a thrill they are to watch.

What does a biographer do when she discovers she has something wrong? I am not talking about a misinterpretation, but missing a great big whopping fact …

In this case, the new information did not concern my subject directly, but her mother. Nevertheless, it has caused me to rewrite parts of both the life and the myth of Charmian Clift.

In 1996, an Age poll found that seventy-six per cent of Australians wanted their country to become a republic. The issue had been rapidly gaining momentum since the early 1990s. The creation of the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) in 1991, and the active championing of the issue by Prime Minister Paul Keating, turned a fringe issue of the 1980s into a realistic prospect.

Walter Lippmann might be the defining example of a public intellectual. He profoundly influenced public and political debate in America during the twentieth century. A prolific journalist and columnist, he also published ten major books and even more edited collections and compilations. The best of these were thought-provoking disquisitions on public opinion, communications, politics, international relations, and the ways in which liberal thought has developed in the United States. His was, argues Tom Arnold-Forster, ‘a six-decade commentary on the vicissitudes of politics’.