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).

The Relationship Is the Project is a guidebook to working with communities. The work explicitly asks the reader to consider not only how art is created but from where that art comes – and it so often comes from community.

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’.

Identity is a hard thing to define. What makes us who we are? We have social identities, shaped by our affinities and proximities to social groups, cultural identities informed by values, languages, rituals, traditions, and a whole multitude of different phenomena that combine to make us who we are.

Decolonising has reached the classics. Complexity, diversity, and entanglement are in. Greece and Rome are, well, out. The movement to ‘reclaim’ Antiquity began with noble aims: to emancipate the ancients from the prism of politics and war through which we like to see them, to emphasise the role of technology and trade in their lives, and to make women and people of colour visible among them again. Alas, decolonisation all too often seems to have descended into ugly arguments over restitution of artefacts (Elgin marbles, anyone?) or the skin shade of this or that Roman notable (Septimius Severus or St Hadrian of Canterbury, for example). Books such as Josephine Quinn’s are the sensible, balancing side of the equation, an antidote to so much virtue signalling and grievance mongering. Quinn’s is an ancient world decentred – provincialised, to invoke Dipesh Chakrabarty’s celebrated term. Greece and Rome remain, but must jostle with others for attention, space, and significance. The argument is simple. Antiquity was far more multipolar, dynamic, and integrated in reality than in the civilisational – and, indeed, civilising – narratives that Europeans since Petrarch have been telling themselves about it.

I have not told anyone that there is a small child growing in my bedside table drawer. The Ziplock bag containing E’s hair, a mass of tangled brown. A handful of baby teeth.

One of Caledonian Road’s primary characters, Milo Mangasha, tends to speak in political slogans, which his childhood friend identifies as ‘college talk’. Readers may recognise in Milo the rhetoric of characters in Andrew O’Hagan’s previous novel, Mayflies (2020), a popular and critical success that was subsequently adapted for television. Like Mayflies, Caledonian Road is stridently certain about its political and moral positions. It reads like a passionate argument for purification. In this fictional world, set in contemporary Britain, a person who maintains ties with corrupt and wealthy conservatives, while voicing left-wing principles and ideals, risks a ‘crack-up’. Failing the test of moral consistency turns you into a cipher, a hollow man, a danger to yourself and others.

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).

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.