For Hillary Rodham Clinton’s admirers, Something Lost, Something Gained cements her place in America’s political pantheon. For her detractors, well, it probably confirms their view. When autobiography morphs into autohagiography, the result is always the same – self-promotion and self-justification become coterminous. Anodyne description masquerades as deep insight, and triviality promotes the Panglossian self-satisfaction that denies the reader any insight into how the author overcame more than her fair share of embarrassment and setbacks.

In a survey on humanity’s most vital inventions, the British public ranked the flush toilet above mobile phones, beds, shoes, and the combustion engine. Who can blame them? In a well-sewered world, we are protected from many of the infectious diseases that contributed to making our unplumbed ancestors’ lives nasty, brutish, and short. Cholera, hepatitis, polio, and the diarrhoeal diseases that continue to kill more people globally than acts of violence all implicate faecal transmission. It seems only rational to dispatch our excrement as quickly as possible in a cleansing torrent of water.

Imagine the uproar if Nick Daicos left Collingwood tomorrow, seduced by a huge financial offer from a rival Australian football competition. Imagine if the reigning Brownlow Medallist, Patrick Cripps, followed suit, then Christian Petracca and Charlie Curnow and more. Chaos would ensue.

In his seminal book I Don’t Want To Talk About It (1997), Terrence Real outlines how contemporary men, within the frameworks of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, must undergo a severing of self from self, and self from community. Real identifies how the so-called masculine power attained through this severing comes from a ‘one down’ position in which the struggle for ‘power over’, rather than ‘power with’, is a central doctrine of what he calls ‘patriarchal masculinity’. This power over, rather than power with, is similarly manifest in international governance, statehood, community and the family unit itself – and it is even manifest in the representation of male characters in Australian literature.

W.E.H. Stanner’s coinage ‘the great Australian silence’ must be one of the best known in Australia’s modern history. It must also rank alongside Donald Horne’s ‘the lucky country’ as one of the least understood.

There is nothing remarkable about this phenomenon. The way a text is received by readers and listeners is seldom in keeping with its creator’s purpose or intention. This is so for several reasons. Most importantly perhaps, any text is open to being read in multiple ways, and in the case of canonical texts like Stanner’s that reception is usually fundamental to its impact.

When you are languishing in a prison cell, you can become intensely creative. John Bunyan, Jean Genet, and Miguel de Cervantes used their time to write classic works of literature. On the eve of his hanging, Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini wrote a memoir to explain why he set out to murder eight people. Louis is fictional, the anti-hero of the film Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).

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.

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.

Dogs have long been a feature of Markus Zusak’s fiction. His pre-fame trilogy of Young Adult novels, centring on brothers Cameron and Ruben Wolfe and their family, deployed the animal as a metaphor for tenaciousness. In the trilogy’s final book, When Dogs Cry (2001), Cameron and Ruben all but adopt Miffy, a Pomeranian whose scrappiness matches that of the brothers and whose death provides the book’s emotional fulcrum. There is a caffeinated hound in The Messenger (2002) and a clothesline-obsessed border collie in Bridge of Clay (2018). Even when, as in Zusak’s best-known work, The Book Thief (2006), dogs are not present, something about the way the author sees them – lovably rambunctious, all rough edges, chaos and, yes, doggedness – permeates the spirit of his two-legged characters.