Tony Horwitz, fêted American journalist-historian, died in 2019 – on the last Monday in May, a day when America ritually honours its war dead and heralds the beginning of summer. Horwitz was sixty. For his wife, Australian journalist and novelist Geraldine Brooks, his death was more than an ironic anomaly: it was an inconceivable rupture in time:

Edwin Frank is the founder and editor of the NYRB Classics series and the editorial director of New York Review Books. He is also the author of Snake Train: Poems 1984-2013 and Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel. He co-edited At the Louvre: Poems by 100 contemporary world poets, reviewed on page 55.

The celebrity ghost-written memoir is the non-fiction form de nos jours. Publishers see it as a winner that combines quality narrative with mass-market appeal. Such memoirs do not even need to contain fresh insight when there is an established fanbase. Just ask Prince Harry about the trouble it causes when a revelation does shock. The idea that a pope should put his name to a co-developed text is nevertheless novel. Of Pope Francis’s predecessors, only that preening Renaissance man of letters Pius II Piccolomini contributed to the genre directly. Piccolomini’s Commentaries, though light-hearted Latin, are also a self-indulgent, self-justifying piece of self-invention. The precedent for Francis does not encourage.

Rosalie Gascoigne seems exemplary of the popular fable of the late-blooming woman artist. Famously, her first exhibition was in 1974, when she was fifty-seven. This swiftly led to national recognition, then international exposure at the 1982 Venice Biennale. So this is a story for the times. But the achievement of Nicola Francis, the artist’s biographer, is to unpack how, in Gascoigne’s case, artistic success in later life was the result of long, careful training in two other creative pursuits: flower arranging, as taught by the English authority Constance Spry; then, crucially, training and a thriving career in the most radical form of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, through the Sogetsu School popularised in Australia by Norman Sparnon.

Of  Gustav Mahler’s numerous military sorties, ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’, a miniature from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, is surely the most affecting. It is the eve of battle, and a young woman is visited by her lover, distant trumpet fanfares and dull drumbeats in the air. But perhaps the lover is already dead and it is his spirit she encounters – or it is a premonition of what the morrow will bring. Regardless, Mahler evokes a mixture of tenderness and gloomy foreboding as the young soldier tells his lover that he is going to the green heath far away. ‘There where the splendid trumpets sound / There is my home of green turf.’

This book is welcome. The purchase of Blue Poles, the most expensive American painting ever bought by an Australian gallery – for more than US$2 million in 1973 – brought into focus a range of Australian cultural and political attitudes of the 1970s. But what are we to make of the subtitle? Was Blue Poles really ‘the painting that changed a nation’?

This is not a book for Scott Morrison, who, as prime minister, declared that Australian history was free of the stain of slavery. Santilla Chingaipe proves otherwise. As she states in her introduction, a key theme of Black Convicts is the exploration of ‘how slavery shaped modern Australia’. In the context of this book, ‘slavery’ is both a specific and an umbrella term for different forms of labour exploitation pursued by the British empire between the 1600s and the 1800s. Chingaipe argues that slavery, convictism, and indentured servitude were linked through a fundamental premise: the abuse and exploitation of people for financial gain. Her primary focus is on convicts, as the title suggests, and how Black men, women, and children transported to Australia ultimately were victims of the same system that enslaved their forebears. These convicts were not chattel slaves – many had once known liberty, and would again – but the direction of their lives, in common with the lives of Black people kept as property and forced to labour on plantations in the Americas, was shaped by colonial masters who placed profit over morality.

Each year the Macquarie Dictionary convenes a panel to select a word of the year. In 2019, the panel chose ‘cancel culture’, which it defined as ‘the attitudes within a community which call for or bring about the withdrawal of support from a public figure’. Since then, cancel culture has been a preoccupation of Australian journalists and politicians, with cancellation serving as shorthand for punishment for expressing dissenting views, and sometimes just for being out of favour with a powerful and homogeneous cohort of unnamed leftists.

As we go to press, a May federal election seems likely – though anything seems possible in 2025. Last November, we invited a number of key commentators to reflect on the US presidential election, with a particular focus on the Australian obsession with American politics. As Australians prepare to vote, we wanted to do something similar – to come at our election from a different angle.

At a time when President Donald Trump seeks to extinguish the legal recognition of trans and gender diverse people, Bonjour, Mademoiselle! and the life of April Ashley feel unexpectedly topical. Ashley, best known in Australia for her role in Corbett v Corbett, a precedent-setting divorce case that set back the legal right of trans people for generations, is the subject of a new biography by Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts.