Non Fiction

William Dalrymple’s tour de force avoids all the pit-falls of superpower competition, identity politics, and over-simplification, but nonetheless places Indian cultural and economic achievements at the centre of the changing worlds of the West and Asia from c.250 bce to 1200 ce. The Golden Road: How Ancient India transformed the world explains how and why Indian influence in China reached a high-water mark ‘never to be reached again’ during the reign of Empress Wu Zetian (the Fifth Concubine), who died at the age of eighty-one in 705 ce, having ruled China for some fifty years.

Shakespeare’s world view – his multiplicity and pluralism, all that teeming vitality crashing up against itself – acts like a tabula rasa even when it is precisely the opposite: one can project oneself onto his work not because it is a blank slate but because it contains multitudes. When it comes to his actual opinions, however – his inclinations and proclivities, his personal, political, and spiritual beliefs – he is notoriously difficult to pin down. One of his greatest skills, after all, is a consummate ability to play both sides of an argument.

Christians so often have problems with sex these days. Australians saw this when, during the Marriage Law Postal Survey, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney begged them to uphold a ‘biblical definition’ of marriage – if there were such a thing. Representatives of every denomination fret endlessly over their responsibility for enabling the sex offenders and abusers of children who were hidden in plain sight in their midst. That some do this even as they fulminate against overt sexual expression in the public sphere (the Paris Olympics opening ceremony anyone?) makes them seem even more out of touch.

Journalist Royce Kurmelovs has written several business-focused books, including a well-received account of the end of Australia’s iconic Holden cars (The Death of Holden, 2016) and a partly personal analysis of the social costs of ubiquitous indebtedness (Just Money, 2020).

In Vex Ashley’s film Machine Learning Experiments, a body – she, they, he, them, take your pick – is penetrated by a luminescent black tube. The body’s boundaries dissolve in the pleasure of becoming: animate/inanimate, human/non-human, interior and exterior, inorganic and inorganic. Backed by the steady pulse of Boy Harsher’s Augustus Muller, the series’ tripartite sequence – ‘Automation’, ‘Orgone Theory’, ‘Hydra’ (this last ‘about invading and consuming’) – offers a psychosocial exploration of transmission and penetrability of all kinds.

In his famous outburst before the gathered men of the Symposium, Plato has Alcibiades declare that behind his ‘Silenus-like’ mask, Socrates is full of ‘divine and golden images’. He can see the gold where others see only the mask, and it is this which makes Alcibiades so desperate for the old man’s approbation. 

The claim of this well-intentioned book is to give an account of the Second Battle of Krithia, which was fought on the Gallipoli Peninsula between 6 and 8 May 1915. However, we do not reach the beginning of the battle until page 187, and it ends on page 257. Thus, we have seventy pages out of 320 on the titular topic of this book.

What a difference a decade makes. When the second decade of the millennium opened, the United States was advocating an open door for trade and investment with China. In November 2011, President Barack Obama, in a speech to the Australian Parliament, revealed Washington’s new strategic and economic policy: the Pivot to Asia.

The Iranian city of Ramsar, overlooking the Caspian Sea, was the site of a meeting that brought together delegates from around the world at the beginning of 1971. The meeting was held to determine the future global management of the world’s few remaining wetlands, vital habitats for transnational migratory bird species such as Latham’s Snipe (Gallinago hardwickii), which fly annually between Australia and Japan.

The birth seasons of the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates may be one of the few details of the nominees that have escaped close scrutiny in the lead-up to November’s election. Such a neo-Hippocratic political analy-sis might also consider their general body types, genealogies, dispositions, and partners, according to the approach of a 1943 study, Lincoln-Douglas: The weather as destiny. Written by a Chicago physician and professor of pathology and bacteriology, William F. Petersen, the meteorological biography of Abraham Lincoln and his political opponent Stephen Douglas sought to make the case for the causal climatic forces on the political trajectories of its protagonists. Lincoln’s success was apparently thanks to his slender physique and ‘better equilibrium with the environment’.