In late 1999, NASA announced that its Mars Climate Orbiter, a multi-million-dollar robot probe designed to study the weather and climate of Mars, was lost somewhere in space. The craft had failed to manoeuvre into its optimal orbit, ending either on a course towards the sun or in a fatal collision with the red planet. Investigations uncovered the source of the blunder: one team working on the orbiter had been using metric measurements, another team had been using imperial.

We Are Free to Change the World, an intellectual biography of Hannah Arendt, is Lesley Stonebridge’s seventh book, and is informed by the author’s expertise in twentieth-century literature, history, law, and political theory. Stonebridge is a Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, and a regular contributor to the New Statesman. A successful scholar, she is also used to communicating to audiences beyond the academy.

Neil Armfield is an Australian director of theatre, film, and opera.  He has directed for all of Australia’s state theatre companies, Opera Australia, The Welsh National Opera, The Bregenz Festival in Austria, Zurich Opera, Canadian Opera, Houston Grand Opera, English National Opera, The Lyric Opera in Chicago, and the Royal Opera House, London. He was co-founder of Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre and was its Artistic Director for seventeen years. He was joint Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival with Rachel Healy from 2017 to 2023.

A mid-career genre change is always cause for attention. Best known for her fearless investigations into institutional sexual abuse, it is hardly surprising that Louise Milligan should transfer her journalistic nous and commitment to social justice into the realm of crime fiction. Pheasants Nest is part of a movement in post-#MeToo crime fiction, which has flourished in Australia and abroad in the past decade. It challenges the norms of the genre to centre victims and amplify the reverberations of violence against women (recent examples include Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women and Jacqueline Bublitz’s Before You Knew My Name).

Jane Hirshfield writes a poem on the first day of each year. ‘Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me’ is one of the new poems in The Asking, along with poems selected from nine collections published since 1982. It begins with a question the world asks (‘as it asks daily’): ‘And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?’

It is only a coincidence that my book Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths, the first in a two-volume cultural biography of the Australian author, ends in 1974 – the same year that Copyright Agency was incorporated – and that it was published in time to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this incorporation. As Moorhouse himself always argued, such coincidences, chance happenings, and historical accidents are often far more important in shaping our culture than we like to concede.

When the former Labor prime minister Paul Keating appeared at the National Press Club in March 2023 to savage the bipartisan commitment to acquire nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS agreement, he did so only days after Anthony Albanese had stood alongside his British counterpart Rishi Sunak and US President Joe Biden in San Diego to announce the ‘optimal pathway’ for the agreement. Fluttering above them were the respective flags of the three nations. In the background lay berthed the USS Missouri, a Virginia class submarine lined with American sailors and festooned with its own bunting. But as Keating noted in typically pungent fashion, on that day ‘there was only one payer: the Australian prime minister … there’s three leaders standing there … [but] only one is paying … our bloke, Albo. The other two, they’ve got the band playing, happy days are here again.’

Iain McCalman was born in Nyasaland in 1947, and educated in Zimbabwe and Australia. He writes British, European, and Australian histories of popular science, politics, conservation, and literary cultures. His books include The Reef: A passionate history (2013) and Delia Akeley and the Monkey (2022). His new book is John Büsst: Bohemian artist and saviour of reef and rainforest (NewSouth, 2024). He is a former President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and was Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Sydney [University] Environment Institute (2011-21). He was awarded Officer of the Order of Australia in 2007 for ‘services to history and the humanities’.

Autofiction differs from autobiography in that, to use Jean Genet’s formula with which Édouard Louis opens his latest novel, Change: A novel, the self is nothing but a ‘pretext’. In Louis’ case, it is a pretext for exploring the self as a sociological, rather than psychological, phenomenon; the enduring product of the social class in which it was forged. Change (first published in 2021 as Changer: méthode) opens with the narrator, Édouard (né Eddy), sitting at his desk writing what will become the novel we are now reading. His objective: ‘to fix the past in writing and, I suppose, to get rid of it’. This will prove easier said than done. As Édouard later discovers, the past has a way of reinstating itself, like a pendulum which is always restored to equilibrium. It is, however, less this resting place than the oscillations that Louis is interested in recording.

Thirty years before the Australian career criminal Gregory David Roberts travelled to Bombay and sought to make for himself, in the words of critic Peter Pierce, ‘a good Asian life’, another socially alienated Australian pursued such a life, in Indonesia, one which in its own way was as remarkable as that novelised by Roberts in Shantaram (2003).