I first met Boris Frankel when he was a thirteen-year-old, in the pages of a file at the National Archives of Australia. I was working on Russian migrant families in Australia that decided to return to the Soviet Union, but then tried to come back to Australia. Boris and his sister Genia had travelled more than 1,500 kilometres from the Crimea to Moscow, alone, in 1959, in the hopes of persuading British authorities to allow their return to Australia. It was a remarkable story: two teenagers who negotiated Soviet bureaucracy and surveillance, made an impassioned plea, and secured the support of a British ambassador. The file even contained letters the children had written to Prime Minister Robert Menzies – their own, teenaged voices. Letters like this are a historian’s dream: I felt I had got to the heart of the story. And yet, in Boris Frankel’s historical memoir, No Country for Idealists, I saw the trip to Moscow anew. In the texture of Frankel’s narrative – their Siberian cabin-mate on the train journey (named Rasputin!), the ambassador’s chef who cooked them breakfast – the wonder of the journey emerged afresh.

Do gay men have a history – and, if so, what is it? Historians have grappled with such questions ever since Michel Foucault first published his History of Sexuality in the 1970s. The stakes are high because they are political: at root, they contest nature versus nurture. We know that men who have sex with other men have existed in every past society. But were those men the same as modern homosexuals? Many contemporary gays claim them as forerunners – yet several scholars see modern homosexuality as, fundamentally, a creation of contemporary late-stage capitalism and a chronological and cultural anomaly, whose associated rights may prove equally ephemeral.

Charmian Clift was a novelist, travel writer, and essayist who, with her writer husband George Johnston, lived with their young family on the Greek island of Hydra from 1955 to 1964. One member of the artist community who gathered around them there, the young Leonard Cohen, described them as having ‘a larger-than-life, a mythical quality’. That mythical quality was matched by real-life fame when, on their return to Australia, George’s novel My Brother Jack (1964) met with huge success, and Charmian became widely known and admired for her regular newspaper columns. Yet within five years of their return, both had died prematurely, Charmian by her own hand in 1969 and George of tuberculosis the following year.

Melanie Joosten’s third novel follows three women who are brought into contact during the fight for British women’s suffrage. Beatrice Taylor, captivated by the movement, becomes a full-blown militant. Her college roommate Catherine Dawson stays out of the direct struggle, preferring to advance women’s rights through a trail-blazing career in scientific research. Ida Bennett, a widow, supports herself and her children as a warden in Holloway Prison. Although sympathetic to the cause of women’s emancipation, when the suffragettes are jailed she is responsible for disciplining them.

‘There are only so many ways to make a story work.’ So begins Liam Pieper’s new novel, Appreciation, a hyper-contemporary chronicle of one artist’s vain attempt to redeem his reputation in the eyes of a disappointed public. Drug-addled, egomaniacal, and hopeless, Oli Darling – an enfant terrible of Australian art – is in desperate need of rehabilitation. And the advice of his equally desperate coterie? Employ a ghost writer and publish your memoir, of course. Pieper having made a career of his own in ghost writing, Appreciation cuts close to the bone. As the opening line suggests, however, there is little room for redemption when all the ways of making your story work have been exhausted.

Two of the defining figures of our age are China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Both are authoritarian rulers intent on reshaping the global Western-led order. They despise and mistrust the United States equally, and, to justify their hold on power, promote a nationalist and civilisationist vision that elevates the long historical and cultural roots of their societies. They have defined themselves as indispensable for their respective countries’ futures and standing in the world.

In Gabriel García Márquez’s most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Colonel Aureliano Buendía twice requests that his poetry be destroyed – first when he is in prison, preparing to face the firing squad. He hands his mother a roll of sweat-stained poems and instructs her to burn them. ‘Promise me that no one will read them,’ he says. His mother promises, but does not burn the poems. Years later, as a different family member is about to light the oven, the colonel hands her the same roll of yellowed papers. ‘Light it with this,’ he says. When she refuses, the colonel feeds the poems to the fire himself.

On 27 August 1783, Jacques Charles launched the world’s first hydrogen balloon flight from the Champ de Mars (now the site of the Eiffel Tower). He excluded his rival Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier from the ticketed reserve. Then, on 21 November, Charles and another ‘navigateur aérien’ made the first manned flight, landing thirty kilometres north of Paris. Montgolfier was invited to cut a ribbon as a gesture of reconciliation in the name of science.

My first encounter with the writing of Anne Manne was ten years ago when I read The Life of I, her incomparable treatment of the various expressions of what she calls ‘the new culture of narcissism’. Some of the examples she adduces in that book are singularly monstrous – like the grandiose bloodlust of Anders Breivik or the sexual malevolence of Ariel Castro – while others are more like expressions of a dominant cultural logic, such as neoliberalism’s valorisation of self-sufficiency and the penalties it accordingly inflicts on both the vulnerable and those who care for them. But in each case she identifies a conspicuous failure of empathy, an incapacity (or perhaps unwillingness) to regard the moral reality of others such that it might present some constraint on the imposition of one’s will, some limit to the realisation of one’s designs.

The title of Omar Sakr’s latest collection references the Covid pandemic and comes from his prose poem ‘Diary of a Non-Essential Worker’. It also reminded me of Plato’s banning of the poets from his ideal republic, and Auden’s line that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Throughout Non-Essential Work, Sakr explores the limits of poetry and its function in society, questioning the value of his own art, letting us in on his doubts. In the poem ‘Your People Your Problem’, he asks: ‘What is a song worth singing here? / The silenced are listening.’ Despite these doubts, or perhaps because of them, he has achieved a powerful collection of lyric poetry, simultaneously political and intimate.