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The art gallery of South Australia has assembled a cast of expert contributors for the catalogue that accompanied its recent exhibition of European decorative arts. Empires & Splendour: The David Roche Collection, is the most expensive publication to date from AGSA and was published with assistance from David Roche.

In death, as in life, Manning Clark casts a long shadow. The author of A History of Australia (1962–87) remains a figure of considerable interest and contention in intellectual and cultural debate. Clark’s imposing oeuvre has its detractors and admirers. In pioneering a fresh and richly imagined awareness of national history for a post-World War II generation of Australians, Clark was an inspiring teacher. He encouraged his students to work with primary source materials. In doing so he assembled for publication three volumes of Australian historical documents that brought the underpinnings of Australian history into the ken of general readers. The publication of these documents served as something of a dress rehearsal for the great task Clark set himself: to write a version of the Australian story he conceived in grandeur and tragedy, nobility and ordinariness. As Carl Bridge has noted, Clark’s History has been seen by some as ‘a majestic blue gum of Australian historical scholarship’, and by others as ‘gooey subjective pap’. With the appearance of each volume, reviewers were sharply divided about the merits of Clark’s style, his interpretation, and even the veracity of his history. But while doubts remain, distance has conceded to the History its standing as a work of literature of the imagination that might sit in the same company as the paintings of Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan, or the novels of Patrick White.

The greatest play by the greatest playwright, Hamlet has over the centuries daunted readers far older than Holden Caulfield. Today, however, he would have another choice: he could read the novel of the play, and one written especially for his age group. John Marsden, the Pied Piper of Australian YA literature, has decided to lead his vast army of devotees into Shakespeare country – to be specific, Elsinore. And why not? The progress from adolescence to maturity is the very stuff of YA fiction, and Hamlet is a story about growing up. Most stage Hamlets are too old. Holden describes the Danish prince as a ‘sad, screwed-up type guy’, and one of the defining features of Marsden’s often dark fiction is exactly this kind of young protagonist.

The Australian ritual of a federal election campaign every two or three years is one in which voters are invited to participate in hyperbole. Reality is magnified a thousand times as the actors perform a finely choreographed political quadrille while their every word and gesture are scrutinised for meaning and analysed for nuance. Yet for all the expensive and lavish hoopla that now constitutes an election campaign, Australians are a reluctant people when it comes to getting rid of governments, however short they fall in expectations. On only eleven occasions in the 107 years of federation have they opted for change.

What can explain the growing assertiveness of Islamist groups? Why are key aspects of the Islamic faith and civilisation that helped Islam flourish in its Golden Age – respect for life and property, philanthropy, tolerance and a thirst for science – being sidelined in the Muslim world? How can we explain the seemingly unstoppable slide from rational thinking in the Muslim world?

The Barton family of Susan Johnson’s Life in Seven Mistakes is ‘unhappy after its own fashion’, to quote Tolstoy’s famous dictum. Elizabeth Barton’s perspective dominates the narrative. A 49-year-old ceramicist who lives in Melbourne and is preparing for her first exhibition in New York, Elizabeth is under pressure to complete some pieces needed for her opening. With her third husband, Neil, Elizabeth and her three children are spending Christmas with her parents. Bob and Nancy Barton have retired to the Gold Coast where they live in a vulgar, ferociously air-conditioned apartment. Also there are one of Elizabeth’s brothers, Robbie, with his wife, Katie, and their two children. The youngest brother, Nick, is in jail for drug offences and erased from the family narrative, but he is ever-present in Elizabeth’s mind.

Milton Osborne began his observations of Phnom Penh as a junior Australian diplomat from 1959 to 1961. Norodom Sihanouk presided over a town influenced by a powerful French cultural presence, a buoyant Chinese commercial sector, Vietnamese clerks, Cambodian civil servants, teachers and bonzes, and free-spending Americans. Osborne returned in April 1966 as a Cornell graduate student, then each year until 1971, the year after Sihanouk was deposed and four years before the terrible entry of Pol Pot’s forces. For a short time during Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia, he worked as a consultant to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on the Thai border, and in 1981 returned to a run-down city full of squatters. In subsequent years, Osborne saw a dispirited and exhausted city regain its self-confidence and some of its joie de vivre, in spite of a government (like others in Asia), rampant with corruption and intolerant of challenges to its power.

Carol Mavor is professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester: a specialist in the field of Victorian photography who has written two earlier books on the subject. She is also one of those rare figures capable of subverting orthodox academic research by stealing some of autobiography’s subjective insight and creative writing’s imaginative reach.

Azhar Abidi’s first novel, Passarola Rising (2006), told of some amazing adventures in a seventeenth-century flying ship, and it was a delight. His new novel could hardly be more different, yet gives just as much pleasure. It also tells a more probable story.

Jana Wendt has conducted her share of difficult and confronting interviews with public figures during her television career, but rather than rehashing old encounters for this book, she spoke afresh to thirteen people, naming each interview after a principle the subject nominated, or one that ‘seemed to me to most obviously propel the thinking and attitudes of the person in question’.