Dear Editor,

In her review of Gary Browning’s Iris Murdoch and the Political (ABR, November 2024) Gillian Dooley notes, ‘After graduating from Oxford she worked in the Civil Service’, then, moves on without further ado to Murdoch’s postwar work with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Dooley doesn’t mention the evidence that has emerged over the years – from Murdoch’s friends John Jones and Phillipa Foot – that she was still an active member of the Communist Party during World War II and passed on documents from government offices to the Communist Party.

James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University in New York, starts his new book with an epigraph listing two dictionary definitions of ‘playbook’: ‘[a] book containing the scripts of dramatic plays’, but also a ‘set of tactics frequently employed by one engaged in a competitive activity’. The Playbook turns on bringing these two definitions together. It argues that the Federal Theatre Project that developed in the United States between 1935 and 1939, as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program, was effectively scuppered by the political machinations of ambitious Texas congressman Martin Dies. In 1938, the wily Dies succeeded in setting up the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), with himself at its head. HUAC became notorious during the Cold War, under the direction of Joseph McCarthy, for its persecution of political dissenters. Shapiro’s thesis is that its nefarious influence began earlier, with the democratic principles he regards as inherent in theatre being peremptorily shut down by Dies’s political opportunism. Shapiro presents this conflict as a forerunner of more recent American culture wars driven by Pat Buchanan in the early 1990s through to Donald Trump in the present day.

In a 2010 interview, Tobin Siebers, the author of Disability Theory and Disability Aesthetics, argued that ‘[d]isability still seems to be the last frontier of justifiable human inferiority’. At the same time, he suggested, the evolution and success of modern art owed much to ‘its embrace of disability as a distinct version of the beautiful’: ‘No object has a greater capacity to be accepted at the present moment as an aesthetic representation than the disabled body.’ A central problem for Siebers was the disconnect between ‘two cultures of beauty’. Could the ‘aesthetic culture’ that celebrated disability influence the dominant ‘commercial culture’ that stigmatised it?

This new book by Clive Hamilton and Myra Hamilton provides a detailed and elegantly written analysis of the nature and causes of inequality in Australia – a problem that has increased markedly over the past forty years. The study focuses on the role of élite privilege, rather than on wealth itself. The authors assert that élite privilege – which they regard as a species of advantage distinct from that of male and racial privilege – has not been sufficiently theorised and, more importantly, is hidden in plain view. The aim of the book is to ‘make visible the practices, beliefs and attitudes that characterise elite privilege and allow its reproduction’. A large part of the book, written by this father and daughter team, is concerned with demonstrating the ways in which the non-meritocratic nature of Australian society is systematically concealed.

Like its precursor movements in the modernist avant-garde (Futurism, Cubism, Dada), Surrealism was primarily initiated as an innovation in poetry. The central Surrealist activities were the collaborative experiments in automatic writing, influenced by psychologist Pierre Janet’s Psychic Automatism (1889) and, in poetics, by Pierre Reverdy’s theory of the image as ‘the juxtaposition of two more or less distanced realities’. These experiments, undertaken between 1919 and 1923 by André Breton and his associates (Phillippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, and others), provide the theoretical basis for Breton’s 1924 ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, the main tenets of which he would follow consistently for the next forty years.

Sally Rooney inspires large quantities of what is known these days as ‘discourse’. This dubious honour is a result of her becoming very successful at a very young age, a misfortune compounded by being cast as a generational representative. She is a ‘millennial’, apparently. Her popularity has not gone unpunished. There have been several high-profile attempts to cut her reputation down to size. She is also Irish, which has led to her being scorned as a privileged white woman, the Irish people famously knowing nothing of suffering and oppression.

‘Well, I always liked Madrid!’ is my father’s verdict on the city; a verbal shrug that manages both to damn with faint praise and gesture at a powerful, unspoken criticism. There is some truth in both: Madrid often finds herself crowded out of ‘Great Cities of the World’ lists and has struggled to win top billing as a tourist attraction, even within Spain itself. The perpetual bridesmaid, despite her official capital status (hello Ottawa, Ankara, and Canberra), she has long been forced to hold the glittering train of Gaudí’s Barcelona. It has taken the zeal and outsider’s gaze of a convert – the accomplished Australian writer and honorary madrileño, Luke Stegemann – to draw her from the shadows in a self-described ‘expression of love … and act of recovery’.

Mark Raphael Baker started writing this memoir on his first night in hospital after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2022. His wife, Kerryn, had died of a rare gastric cancer seven years before. His brother, Johnny, died of oesophageal cancer just two years after Kerryn. He is also reckoning with the death of his elderly father. The emotional intensity of these losses is the foundation of A Season of Death. ‘Three graves in five years,’ Baker writes. ‘While no number of deaths could make me indifferent to what awaits me, watching a sequence of deaths in the family has made me more prepared. I feel as though I have been trained or mentored in the art of dying.’

Part one of Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls – a homage to magical realism and some of its greatest proponents, including Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez – presents an unnamed narrator searching for truth in a fantastical library behind a guarded wall. The two further parts also explore the idea of the inhabitation of libraries. Indeed, this will be familiar to Murakami’s readers, for he has written about libraries before. For instance, in his children’s novella The Strange Library (1983) a schoolboy is imprisoned in the under-ground maze of his local library and told to memorise books.