I am grateful to Theodore Ell for alerting readers to two factual errors in the essay ‘George Orwell’s Elephant’ in the book of the same name that he reviewed (ABR, August 2024). I regret the errors and my failure to correct them. The editorial team at Gazebo Books and I worked closely together on the manuscript, and to blame solely the editorial team for errors would be unjust and ungracious. I am the author and I take full responsibility.

Jorge Luis Borges thought the appearance of a major new author or creative work should prompt a realignment of literature’s family tree. Fresh genealogies of influence suddenly manifested, while old antecedents could find themselves pruned to a nub. Borges knew that actions in the present can remake our sense of past and future both.

Valerie and Yvonne Cohen were ‘artful’ in more ways than one. Both sisters were artists, and most of their friends and lovers were artists. They were ‘artistic’, seeking an unconventional life. For years they spent their winters on a tiny tropical island. And they – particularly Val – were artful dodgers.

There is a great deal going on in Christine Paice’s new novel, The Oxenbridge King. In this narrative, we meet the troubled soul of Richard III (1452-85), unable to find rest, a contemporary young woman who struggles with loss and misjudged relationships, an angel emerging from his chrysalis after being trapped for centuries in the cellar of the family home, and a talking bird that operates as a link between characters, places, times. In what can feel like dreamlike jolts, the parallel immediacies of 500 years ago and today keep warping and collapsing into each other.

Loïc Wacquant has documented the migration of the term ‘underclass’ from its original structural meaning (as coined by Gunnar Myrdal) to contemporary usage, classifying those who exbibit a cluster of behaviours provoking anxiety or disgust from mainstream society. Australian publishing is, belatedly, providing opportunities for diverse voices across gender, sexuality, and race, but the underclass Wacquant delineated remains largely mute.

If you ever came across a vector in a high-school science class, it probably looked quite simple: a little arrow you might draw on a diagram to show the motion of a train or the forces on a swinging pendulum. An arrow pointing right would cancel an arrow pointing left, or → + ← = 0. Add together two arrows pointing in the same direction, you get one twice as long: →. A rightward arrow plus an upward one? You’ve got yourself a diagonal: → + ↑ =  ↗.

Professor George Williams AO is the Vice-Chancellor and President at Western Sydney University. He commenced as Western Sydney University’s fifth Vice-Chancellor in July 2024, bringing decades of experience as a constitutional law scholar and teacher, senior leader in higher education, barrister and as a national thought leader. His latest book with David Hume is People Power: How Australian referendums are lost and won (UNSW Press, 2024).

Within the English language ‘elite’ is one of those French loan words comfortable enough in its new habitat to have dropped its accent in many publications (though not this magazine). Adopted substantially following France’s reckoning with its own élites after 1789, it joined other Gallic descriptors of high society such as ‘le bon ton’ and still retains a residual whiff of suspicious foreign origins. Crusading journalist William Cobbett preferred the robust old English term ‘the Thing’ to describe the interlocking networks of social, economic, and political privilege that misgoverned Britain in the aftermath of revolution. Usage of ‘elite’ only soared after World War II, and especially from the 1950s, when cognate terms such as ‘the Establishment’ also became common coin. In its adjectival form in the United Kingdom, as in Australia, ‘elite’ retains some positive connotations. Generally, we are comfortable with the notion of élite athletes, as even the most cursory follower of the recent Olympic Games will have noted. As an adjective applied to other areas of life such as education and politics, or worse still as a noun, it has become a kind of slur.

He wakes in a city, briefly unsure which one. Already adrift. They have all begun to look alike, possessing the same anonymous modern functionality. Characterless, sleek. Architectural Esperanto, he calls it, ‘anonymous, with nothing to exclaim but their speed of construction and size’. His day is business: Asian multinationals, large sums of money. A curious vagueness to proceedings – the bigger the sums, the more abstract the work. He is little more than an intermediary. Home is an interchangeable hotel room on a high floor, but there’s always some trust-fund entrepreneur or high-powered businessman to remind him of his place. Night is drinking, piano bars, women of the night. Time itself is a kind of fluid construct, landing nowhere in particular. (‘No tense. Like the airports, what was is and will be.’) Only one place of possible return matters to him, and one courtesan there. Saigon. Tien. He is nameless and will remain so beyond the novel’s final page.

Robyn Arianrhod is a science writer, and an affiliate of Monash’s School of Mathematics. Her reviews have appeared in Australian Book Review, The Age, Times Higher Education, The Mathematical Intelligencer, Cosmos, and Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Her latest book is Vector: A surprising story of space, time, and mathematical transformation (UNSW Press, 2024).