My first experience of Carlo Felice Cillario was in March 1969, when he conducted the Elizabethan Trust Opera’s production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne. I had never seen the opera; nor had I heard of its conductor, whose triple-barrelled name was more indicative of a musical marking than something that belonged to an active musician. ‘Active’ was certainly the word: Cillario rushed into the pit and, afterwards, practically danced on to the stage, baton still in hand, to rapturous applause. In between, the actual performance was the first time I really connected to the compelling vivacity and innate drama of live opera. It helped immeasurably that the cast included the great Australian tenor Donald Smith as King Gustavus III. That night, all of it, still resounds in my mind.

In Li-Young Lee’s ‘Furious Versions’, a poem reckoning with his family’s exile, there is a question: ‘How then, may I / speak of flowers / here, where / a world of forms convulses.’ Eileen Chong draws these lines into her sixth book of poetry as an epigraph, reorienting them to find her title, expanding Lee’s first-person singular into the plural ‘we’, its question into statement. This drawing-into-connection and shifting is central to Chong’s poetics, established in her striking début collection, Burning Rice (2011), which includes an image linking women, flowers, and power. ‘The Flower of Forgetting’ ends: ‘Women can be strong. Flowers too.’

Just a few years ago, retiring after sixteen years as Germany’s chancellor (2005-21), Angela Merkel was praised to the skies as a stateswoman who represented all that was admirable in a (semi-)united Europe. Now her reputation has taken a nosedive (‘Angela who?’ The Economist asked, tongue in cheek, last October). That’s an occupational hazard for politicians, and Merkel, as a seasoned professional, knew the score. Still, she deserves to be remembered, if only because in 2015 she did something that seasoned professionals very rarely do: ignoring the risks, she took an important political decision for moral reasons. That decision was to open Germany’s doors to thousands of refugees from North Africa and the Middle East – in the end almost a million – desperately trying to enter Europe via the Mediterranean.

The most famous blackboard in the world resides in Oxford’s History of Science Museum. It was salvaged from the cleaners after Albert Einstein gave an Oxford lecture in 1931, and I confess to being one of the many visitors to gaze upon it with awe. It is a talisman, its continuing existence a cultural recognition of the thrall, and importance, of genius.

What lasts as well as this illustration of the ark
kept over since childhood? The closed cabin,

that dark indoors, huge and somehow private,
like all homes of love. The shake of the storm

How can a self-proclaimed nation of immigrants,’ asks Brianna Nofil, the author of The Migrant’s Jail, ‘also be a place that imprisons tens of thousands of immigrants, exiles, and refugees?’ In answering that question, Nofil, an assistant professor of history at William and Mary, researches the history of the crucial role of local county jails and their widespread deployment by the federal government to build the largest migrant detention and deportation system in the world. Incarceration was the prelude to deportation.

In his brief Foreword to H.D.’s posthumous collection, Hermetic Definition (1974), Yale Professor Norman Holmes Pearson (1909-75) provides an authoritatively crystalline summary of the poet’s life’s work. Asserting the primacy of her later poetry, the ‘war trilogy’ (1942-44) and Helen in Egypt (1961), Pearson recovers H.D. from her accepted but ‘inadequate’ typecasting as an Imagist, identifying her deployment of Freud as ‘a great mythologist’ in her highly personal engagement with hermetic and kabbalistic sources.

The title of The Empusium, the newly translated work by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is an invention. It is a portmanteau that fuses masculine and feminine literary allusions: first, Plato’s Symposium, which tells of a drunken Athenian banquet in which great statesmen give speeches on the nature of love; second, the empusa, a shape-shifting female demon who, according to Greek mythology, had the sirenic ability to lure and prey upon young men.

Zahra Stardust is, in her own words, ‘a sex worker in the academy’ who champions the ‘epistemology of whores’, a term she coined to describe the ‘unique lens through which sex workers know about the world’. As she impressively models in her first book, Indie Porn: Revolution, regulation and resistance, published in Duke University Press’s innovative Camera Obscura series, this epistemology is multifaceted and multi-purpose. Stardust, a research fellow at Queensland University of Technology, takes us behind the scenes, while expanding what a book about pornography can be. Against enduring ‘whore stigma’, which functions to keep sex workers at society’s margins and ‘sex’ within heteronormative bounds, Stardust flips the script. Sex workers, and in particular porn performers like herself and the many others whom she interviews and cites, have much to tell the rest of us about the algorithmic, gig economy world we all live in.

Boris Johnson is of course one of the most distinctive political leaders of recent times. With his mop of unruly blond hair, plummy Etonian tones, and carefully confected air of bumbling amiability, he seems to have been on the British political scene for decades. In fact, his political career has been relatively short by comparison with many of his peers. This in turn helps explain the timing of Unleashed. As becomes clear, Johnson is in no mood for idle reminiscence or nostalgia for the top table.