The subject of this fine biography was my Doktorvater or postgraduate supervisor. He hailed from York, ancient capital of England’s northern counties. So did my biological father, Wilfred Prest (1907-1985). Both won university scholarships to study history. But their family backgrounds and life trajectories were very different.

With more than two decades of experience in interviewing at SBS and the ABC, Kumi Taguchi knows how to craft a person’s story and build a reader’s sympathy. The Good Daughter, her first book, is a memoir. Here she looks inward, transferring these interviewing skills to herself as the subject.

Belgium’s history with what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo is one of brutality and exploitation. In 1885, Leopold II, King of the Belgians from 1865 to 1909, became the sole owner of what was then called the Congo Free State. The story of how one of Africa’s largest countries, roughly the size of Western Europe, became privately owned – that is, not owned by the Belgian state but by its people’s king – is one of complex deceit, subterfuge, greed and mania. Leopold was responsible for the killing and mutilation of millions of people – some estimate up to ten million – in Central Africa. Animals were victims too. ‘At the start of the nineteenth century there were up to twenty-six million elephants in Africa. That number currently sits between four and five hundred thousand.’ In nine years, the tusks of 94,000 elephants were shipped into Antwerp alone. Eventually, forced to relinquish to Belgium his so-called Congo Free State, Leopold destroyed all incriminating documents, writing to an aide, ‘I will give them my Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there.’ The Palace furnaces were said to burn for eight days.

The poems of Bathypelagia by Debbie Lim and Re:Vision by Isi Unikowski are poems of cartography; they map the unknown and probe the world with human curiosity, tracing meaning onto elusive places, feelings, and encounters, solidifying these through the writing process. Both collections conspire to understand the world as they construct their realities one line at a time, the poems themselves moving – in the former’s case, vertically from the deep sea, and, in the latter’s case, through the casting of light, the revealing of landscapes.

Ron Chernow is a renowned journalist and bestselling biographer, whose best-known work is probably Alexander Hamilton (2004), the main inspiration for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American musical (2015). Chernow’s latest book joins several acclaimed biographies of Mark Twain that have appeared in recent decades, including Gary Scharnhorst’s three-volume Life (2018, 2019, and 2022). The complete Autobiography of Mark Twain, also in three volumes, was published in 2010, 2013, and 2015. Twain dictated much of this to Albert Bigelow Paine, his authorised biographer and literary executor. As Chernow reflects, ‘The challenge for Paine, as for all future Twain biographers, was that Twain was peerless at bending the truth.’

How many times will I have to exhume you?

You rise again, a winter bulb. White corm of your face blanched as a knuckle, the quivering mycelium of your hair, stirring.

Every now and then, a truly profound book appears on a profoundly important subject. Mark Lilla’s Ignorance and Bliss is one such book.

1. When you fall, one speaker goes with you. They’ve been daisy-chained around the house, so those on the deck get the same din that’s piped out to the stairwell, a playlist to pound your Docs to. You’re dancing with a vengeance by now, erotic stomps with industrial tread, your hips a counterweight where gravity meets velvet, fingernails raking the air. Someone has spliced in ultra-long cable, so the speaker follows you, to the bottom. But if it’s still singing when it hits, your brain has switched station.

The proposed abolition of the Australian National Dictionary Centre represents a significant retreat from the Australian National University’s long-standing commitment to supporting a national public culture. This should alarm all of us, not least the Australian taxpayer who contributes $220 million a year – received by no other Australian university – so that the ANU can conduct significant research ‘supporting the development of Australia’s national unity and identity, including by improving Australia’s understanding of itself and the history and culture of its Indigenous peoples, its Asia-Pacific neighbours, and its place in the international community’. 

The War Within Me is the second book in Tracy Ryan’s trilogy on the Queens of Navarre, a kingdom precariously sandwiched between the powerful monarchies of France and Spain. In 1512 Navarre had lost much of its territory to Spain; its continued survival thereafter depended upon a complicated diplomatic dance with the French court. The first book in Ryan’s series followed the life of Marguerite of Angoulême, sister of François I of France, who married Henri II of Navarre in 1526. Now Ryan turns attention to their only daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, who succeeded to the throne after her father’s death in 1555.