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This novel is Sonia Orchard’s second book, published six years after her first, the compelling and intimate memoir Something More Wonderful (2003). For those who read the memoir – the harrowing story of her thirty-one-year-old friend’s battle with cancer – The Virtuoso may come as a surprise. Orchard has abandoned her own assured voice for that of a fictional and unreliable narrator, a young Englishman besotted with a concert pianist, slightly older than himself. The milieu is an eccentric circle of musicians and writers in 1940s London. If there is any similarity between Orchard’s memoir and her novel, it is the narrator’s stance as the observer, with a beloved and idealised friend at centre stage.

‘Read monkeys for pre-existence’ wrote the twenty-nine-year-old Darwin in one of his notebooks, pondering Plato’s assertion that our ‘imaginary ideas’ derive from the pre-existence of the soul. Two years earlier, when HMS Beagle had returned from its circumnavigation of the world, Darwin was still a creationist, albeit one who had entertained doubts. Keen to capitalise on his wide-ranging collection, and to make a name for himself, he arranged for various experts to examine the specimens. Fairly quickly during the ensuing discussions, Darwin realised that his doubts concerning the stability of species were ready to burgeon into a new and disturbingly materialist worldview.

Shots, so the media release claims, is written in ‘mesmerising prose.’ Yeah, right! This is the life story of a rock musician they are talking about. I can recall attempting to read one such memoir, a well-meaning present from a friend who might have known better. It was by Ray Manzarek, of The Doors; it was called Light My Fire (1999) and it was completely and utterly awful. Manzarek’s organ may have on occasion swooped and swirled like a graceful albatross, but his prose is as scruffy and unsociable as a giant petrel. After twenty pages, I couldn’t care less whether it was Jim Morrison or Jack the Ripper buried in that Paris graveyard. Now, here I am faced with the journal of another borderline celebrity with too much time on his hands, a keyboardist from an ‘iconic’ rock band to boot. This book could not be anything other than a waste of everyone’s time.

The Cambridge Companion series has been a very successful venture, presenting readers with handy, up-to-date collections of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars on a wide range of authors and topics. This co-edited volume on British Romantic poetry encompasses many of the key topics in Romantic literary studies of the last two decades: historicism, canonisation, antiquarianism, Gothicism, the lyric, the rise of standardised English, women’s writing, colonialism, poetry’s relationship with the novel and with philosophy, and the legacy of Romanticism in contemporary poetry. There are also several essays which, in their originality and complex argumentation, cannot be so easily summed up and labelled: a brilliant reading by James Chandler of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ Ode as an important continuation of the eighteenth century’s ‘progress of poetry’ theme; an analysis of Romantic-era poetry which argues that the study of Romantic poetry belongs as much to media history as to literary scholarship; and an essay by Kevis Goodman which, by tracking the discursive migration of nostalgia from medical discourse into the heart of Romantic aesthetics, challenges the usual clichés of this period’s poetry as a de-historicising ‘exile from the present’, a poetry of return and retreat.

As a poet Robert Gray is a magical storyteller. His first poetry collection, Creekwater Journal (1974), marked out his key territory of interest: the small towns, rural communities, landscapes, and people of the New South Wales north coast. Although he has travelled widely and written about other cultures, cities, and characters, his poetry’s richness is still tethered to the textures, talk, and rhythms of his country town childhood. His word pictures immediately transport the reader to another place. The idea that ‘eucalypts are the blue of husky voices’ or the recognition of a long jetty and ‘a few gull­molested fishing boats’ are the images of a beguiling writer.

Glowing reviews of an author one is not familiar with can inspire scepticism, but in the case of David Francis these tributes are justified. Stray Dog Winter – an impressive political thriller – is set mostly in Moscow in 1984, with occasional flashbacks to Melbourne during the 1970s.

Julian Halls’s novel The Museum is a recent addition to Australian gay and lesbian fiction. The text engages with an important issue relating to same sex-attracted men and women, but it is ultimately disadvantaged by a distinct sense of amateurishness.

Imagine a street with a neo-Gothic church, a fish and chip shop, and bronze statues of Winston Churchill, Florence Nightingale, and Shakespeare. Someplace in England? No, it’s Thames Town, a satellite on the outskirts of Shanghai. German, Czech, Spanish, Scandinavian and American suburbs are also planned, to cater to the new Chinese middle class, for many of whom, like the Chinese for most of the twentieth century, ‘modern’ equals ‘Western’. Or recall your local Chinatown, with its ‘Chinese’ shops and restaurants, curved roof façades and resident diaspora, many of them convinced that they are preserving the ‘real’ Chinese culture, now lost in the mainland’s twentieth­century convulsions. How does each of these represent modern Chinese culture?

Moral panics, which Stanley Cohen, in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), said involve any group of people who are defined as a threat to societal values and interests, were grist to John Howard’s mill during refugee debates. Applying the classic analysis, his governments were ‘moral entrepreneurs’ who employed scare tactics whenever a perceived threat arose. Asylum seekers and their supporters were ‘folk devils’, outsiders and deviants responsible for the problems placing our values and principles in jeopardy.

In 1977, in three consecutive issues, the New Yorker published Hannah Arendt’s ‘Thinking’. Each part was called an ‘article’, a strangely modest, journalistic word in the face of the length of each part of the essay and the profound subject. Thirty-two years ago, the magazine showed curmudgeonly modesty: writers were named in small print at the foot of each ‘piece’, there was never, god forbid, a sub-editor’s catch-all under the title, no short biographies of the writers were printed, and there were never, ever, visual illustrations or photographs to accompany the text. The issue in which the first of Arendt’s ‘articles’ appeared included poetry by Mark Strand; the long book review was by George Steiner; Pauline Kael was the film reviewer; there were four Saul Steinberg drawings; and Andrew Porter reported on classical music. The list of names we revere could go on.