Women give birth to babies, but according to patriarchal myth men give birth to nations. As the eminent political theorist Carole Pateman observed some time ago, literature is full of stories of men giving birth to nations, political orders, or political life itself, an explicitly male appropriation of procreative power. In the new discursive order of modernity, political creativity belongs to masculinity.

When teaching the history of medieval Europe it is hard to resist regaling students with lurid accounts of some of the extreme devotional practices performed by medieval women mystics. Saint Catherine of Siena, so it was claimed, drank the vomit of lepers to abase herself before God. Marie of Oignies, apparently, refused to eat anything but the consecrated host and died of starvation. Julian of Norwich lived in seclusion, inside a cell attached to a church, having renounced all things of the world including the opportunity to go outside. These women’s lives, in the retelling, can offer a visceral sense of the strangeness of medieval religious culture, and can also provide a sense of the particularity of gendered celebrity in pre-modernity. As a teacher, however, I am loathe to lean too heavily into the ostensible spiritual otherness of the Middle Ages. I worry that presenting these women as freaks risks alienating students from the historical work I am training them to do; to make sense of historical difference on its own terms.

‘The last word on The Ring will never be written,’ writes Michael Downes in the Prologue to his new book outlining the creative history of Richard Wagner’s tetralogy. As with everything else in Story of the Century: Wagner and the creation of The Ring, Downes makes good sense, for a seemingly infinite number of interpretations of Wagner’s magnum opus are possible. Wagner believed in the power of myth, and the Ring is timeless – about more than the giants, gods, dwarves, and humans it portrays. While on one hand it seems to be a warning against the abuse and retention of power in which love ultimately triumphs, on the other it has been taken as a manifesto for German nationalism and unsavoury racial views. The Ring has also been viewed as a comment on the industrialisation of Wagner’s era, a warning against ecological disaster, as a socialist allegory, even in terms of Jungian psychology – to mention just a few examples, all of which testify to the hold it has over people.

To attack a pinata

Having just seen Bell Shakespeare’s Henry 5 in Melbourne – where it has this week opened – and reading so many flattering reviews of the production, I was beginning to wonder what I’d missed. It was therefore heartening to read Jonathan Ricketson’s (online) review which, for me, encapsulated the many flaws of the production as well as its few inspired moments. This was a king who did not seem to have the vigour to attack a pinata, let alone the Kingdom of France. More egregiously, this was a production that appeared to have nothing at all to say.

What is the twentieth-century novel? asks Edwin Frank in Stranger than Fiction. What it is not, he begins, is the nineteenth-century kind. This doesn’t mean he argues from a merely negative premise; rather, he’s attempting to wrest the discussion from certain warping assumptions. The very notion of periodisation by centuries – a ‘convenient, newly minted unit’, writes Frank, ‘larger than a lifetime, conformable to the memory of the nuclear family and designed to connect past to future in the developing narrative of human history’ – is itself a product of the nineteenth century.

Fawaz Gerges is a leading expert on mainstream Islamist movements, jihadist groups, and social movements in the Middle East. He has interviewed hundreds of civil society leaders, activists, and mainstream and radical Islamists in the Muslim world and within Muslim communities in Europe. Two decades ago, his in-depth field research resulted in The Far Enemy: Why Jihad went global (2005). It showed that the 9/11 terror attacks united social forces in the Muslim world against Al Qaeda. The dominant response of jihadi groups was an explicit rejection of Al Qaeda and total opposition to the internationalisation of jihad. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation gave Al Qaeda a ‘new lease on life, a second generation of recruits and fighters, and a powerful outlet to expand its ideological outreach activities to Muslims worldwide’.

From whiskey priests and crazed conquistadors to sun-maddened tourists, stories of white exile in South America are staples of Western literature and film. Such tropes are productively complicated in an outstanding début novel by Rachel Morton.

Why read a dystopian novel when the present already feels dystopian? In a round-up in The New Yorker of speculative fiction released during the first Trump administration, the historian and critic Jill Lepore criticised the ‘radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism … [which] cannot imagine a better future’. Her point was that the genre had become mired in despair and hopelessness; that what had once been a literature of resistance in the age of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley had descended into a ‘fiction of submission’. In her masterful new novel, Salvage (2025), Jennifer Mills offers the antidote that Lepore sought: gleaming speculative fiction with a core of humanism and hope.

Readers of Stephen Gapps’s work will be delighted to see this latest instalment of his quest to highlight the reality of Australia’s internal wars from 1788. Gapps’s first major contribution to this literature was The Sydney Wars (2018), which detailed the military conflicts between the Darug-speaking peoples of Sydney Harbour and the British newcomers from the First Fleet to 1817. His second, Gudyarra (2021), focused on the battles between the Wiradyuri and the settlers around today’s Bathurst region from 1822 to 1824. Gapps’s new book, Uprising, takes us over the full middle swathe of colonial New South Wales, including campaigns from dozens of clans, between 1838 and 1844. Each volume moves us forward in time and over greater expanses of Country. Collectively, the Gapps trilogy is a clear and detailed refutation of Australia’s continued reluctance to name the violent episodes that occurred between black and white peoples before 1901 as what they so plainly were: war.

To begin, a reviewer’s disclosure: I have known Lucy Sussex since we worked together in the mid-1990s on a research project about nineteenth-century Australian women’s writing. Lucy had already been following the various trails and clues left by crime writer Mary Fortune (1832–1911) along the winding, dimly lit corridors of pre-digital cultural history, as she reports at the end of this book: ‘In 1987 I moved from librarianship to working as a researcher for Professor Stephen Knight … I got the delightful job of largely reading old and vintage crime texts and reporting back … Stephen asked me to look into “Mrs Fortune” [and later] told me that Mary Fortune was no longer his research project, but mine. “You have that gleam in your eye!” he said.’