In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Remarkably, Ukraine fought an effective, close-run defensive campaign and the war turned into a quagmire for Vladimir Putin’s regime. As early as the following month, with the appalling revelations from Bucha of Russian atrocities, it was clear that this was – as they all are – a very dirty war. At the time of writing, the frontline exists in precarious stalemate and serious questions loom about the reliability of ongoing US-led material support, which is necessary for Ukraine to continue the resistance.

During a recent lunar eclipse, I marvelled as Earth’s shadow nibbled away the Moon’s light. This creeping shadow testified to the awesome movement of the celestial spheres, Earth inching along its trajectory around the Sun while the Moon fell around Earth until, on this special night, all three bodies were closely aligned in the same plane: Sun, Earth, Moon. A related alignment occurs each month, when the Sun’s light is reflected from the full, uninterrupted Moon. We can see it because the Moon orbits Earth in a slightly different plane from that of Earth’s motion around the Sun. But on this night, the Moon was passing through a point where these two planes intersected, so that Earth directly blocked the light from Sun to Moon.

In August 1943, John F. Kennedy, then aged twenty-six, was rescued from the threat of Japanese captivity – or worse – by a few brave Solomon Islanders, in an operation coordinated by the Australian naval officer Reg Evans. Evans was one of the Royal Australian Navy’s ‘Coastwatchers’, intelligence collectors based perilously behind Japanese lines.

There’s a poem that begins

But that other wreck, where the crew tumbles out of a bad dream

and into a worldwide storm of interpretation.

Life is inhearsed, everything’s on affective hold for an hour

as the heavens pause. A melancholy playlist is blinking its lights.

It was the time when the awful narrative of their journey

was lost at sea, the violence of the weather and the politics

of humans and demi-gods all cast into the deep.

On a fatherhood weekend, the men drag
a dead manna gum, chained to a ute, into camp.
They’re talking innocence. Is it inborn, or clad
layer by layer by behaviour? Around the grey stump
the men start chainsaws and crack beers, open
a phone (there’s reception), search innocence definition.
Blamelessness. Chastity. Childhood. But also
integrity, which means innocence. The confusion
– that integrity means wholeness too –
heats up when one man says he heard children
arrive with sin. Then two-stroke fumes
drown the twilight bush’s scat-and-pepper scents.
They cut it. Some of the men scream, some don’t,
when spiders erupt from the warm hollow.

Back in the 1970s, when I went up to Katerina Clark’s place in Connecticut for the weekend, I was always a bit on my guard. Katerina was a wonderful and generous friend, but inquisitive. Being young, I had things in my personal life I wanted to hide. A silent tussle went on between us as she did her best to ferret them out (probably knowing from her other sources more or less what they were) and I stone-walled.

Even in his first publication, the seven short stories of the rightly celebrated The Boat (2008), Nam Le was perhaps always most interested in creating an aura of violent unpredictability. He withheld consistency, offered cruxes, hit the reader with a blizzard of bold plots in settings so varied as to be practically contradictory – Hiroshima, Medellin, New York City, a fishing town on the Queensland coast. Where, as in the title story, Nam Le appears to relent and writes about what may have been his own experience (he was ferried to Australia as an infant), the baby dies. He is like a package determined not to contain what it says on the disclosure form; a letter that won’t be delivered to the stated address.

Novelists and historians alike must choose how to tell their story. They may prefer a traditional authoritative voice, recounting the story in chronological order. Events surprise or shock as they unfold on the page, arriving at an apparently inevitable conclusion. This familiar organising principle holds our attention, but comes with constraints. Material must make sense within the timeline, or the narrative stalls. Think of Tolstoy’s long digression on farming in Anna Karenina or Hugo on constructing the sewers of Paris in Les Misérables, as we wait impatiently for Jean Valjean to flee the barricades.

This volume brings together two highly credentialled thinkers about moral and ethical matters: Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and Venerable Shih Chao-Hwei, a Taiwanese Buddhist nun, founder of the animal welfare organisation the Life Conservation Association and the Buddhist Hong-Shi College, as well as a lecturer at Hsuan Chuang University.

Few terms capture the imagined structure of European history as succinctly, and aptly, as ‘the Middle Ages’. Whether the era is being invoked fondly, casually, or with deep disdain, the term at once offers a comprehensive, normative account of civilisation and casts aspersions on those out of sync with it. It was designed to do just that. ‘The Middle Ages’ inserts itself as an antithesis between two seemingly cohesive periods: Antiquity and the Renaissance (the latter soon to be replaced by Enlightenment and then Modernity). It thus creates continuity by underscoring rupture, and stresses similarity through difference. Despite the era’s appeal to the Romantics and nascent nationalism in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, respectively, its poor reputation has been steady: from Jules Michelet’s quip about ‘the Middle Ages’ being ‘one thousand years without a bath’, to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, where Marsellus Wallace famously vows ‘to get medieval’ on his torturer’s ass.