Editors tend not to look back – there is simply no time for nostalgia. Many literary editors in Australia work alone, or with one or two part-time assistants. Australian Book Review now has a staff of four (it was three when I began in 2001). This may seem huge, but check out the imprint pages of like publications in London or New York and note the difference. We smile when people ring our office and ask to speak to the advertising manager or the marketing manager. As if!

Gerald Glaskin’s 1965 novel No End to the Way is high on melodrama and long out of print, but it had a life-changing effect on Tony Scotland. Published under the pseudonym Neville Jackson, it examines the tangled relations of three gay men living in Australia in the 1960s. Two of them live in a configuration resembling wedlock, until the third (the ex-lover of one of the men), in a spasm of envy, blackmails the couple and dynamites the relationship.

There are moments in political history when the electoral contest is real, visceral, and there are other times when the governing party is so visibly exhausted and the context so apparently unfavourable that the prudent move is not to try too hard to win. Such was the case at the last British general election, held in July 2024. After four consecutive victories, five changes of prime minister, and a litany of disasters, scandals, and failures, the governing Conservative regime led by the likeable but hapless Rishi Sunak finally keeled over and gave way to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. Starmer won a majority of 174 seats, with a relatively modest thirty-four per cent of the popular vote.

Calibre Essay Prize

Jeanette Mrozinski – an MFA candidate in non-fiction at Washington University in St Louis – has won the 2025 Calibre Essay Prize. Her essay, ‘Eucharist’, is the propulsive story of a bureaucrat and part-time sex worker chasing down life-saving medication and of the nameless saints who come to her aid. Ms Mrozinski becomes the first American to win the Calibre Prize, now in its nineteenth year and long established as one of the world’s leading prizes for an unpublished essay.

The judges – Georgina Arnott (Editor and CEO of ABR), Theodore Ell (2021 Calibre Prize winner), and Geordie Williamson (writer-publisher and Deputy Chair of ABR) – chose ‘Eucharist’ from a field of 648 entries from twenty-six countries. Here is their comment on Jeanette Mrozinski’s essay:

This is a work based on deep scholarship, by two leading historians of China. The writing is clear and precise, the narrative richly informed by primary sources. Personal stories of individuals are used to great effect.

Adam lives with his father. Teddy lives with his parents and a sister. Both are children of broken or fragile relationships, about to enter their senior year of high school. Adam’s father appears to have ‘given up’ on life; he has stopped drinking and succumbed to ‘mute anger’. Adam hasn’t seen his mother in six years, since she left the family, and Teddy resents his mother’s extramarital affair. In both cases, the family home is a source of gloomy unease, with fathers who are incapable of dealing with the realities of their lives.

For centuries, popes have been remote figures, information about their private lives carefully controlled to safeguard their image and promote the mystique of the office. Jesus Wept, describing the past seven popes, provides a good argument for this traditional strategy; it shows what fallible, flawed men they are when details emerge. They were often unpleasant, sometimes bullies, sometimes cowards, sometimes expedient, always intensely political – though the last is an unavoidable part of the job.

There has been, for some time, a debate among researchers of Australian history. Should the moral and psychological dimensions of settler experience be examined, or do we know enough already?

‘The unpredictability of biography,’ writes Timothy Snyder in On Freedom, ‘flows into the unpredictability of history.’ This is self-evidently true of leaders who, like William Henry Gates III, also known as Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, initiate the kinds of change that are destined to be viewed as history. Their lives, like all of ours, are amply shaped by contingency and event, the ‘what if’ moments and decisive decisions, both their own and others’. The mystique of what might never have been, or might have been otherwise, is powerful. Even though there are many alternatives and competitors, it is hard to imagine personal computing evolving as it did without the ubiquitous Microsoft products that have shaped the world. Consumer technologies such as these, which were also an early form of AI, have become all but invisible. Gratifyingly, the Microsoft co-founder and former CEO’s first autobiographical instalment, Source Code, is liberally sprinkled with fork-in-the-road moments and tensions. It is a hero’s journey narrative, blending memoir with personal case studies in business leadership and strategy. The book begins with Gates’s early childhood and ends in 1978. The author foreshadows a further two volumes.

While reading this book, I saw an ABC TV Foreign Correspondent program on volunteer health workers in Ukraine tackling frontline fighters’ horrific injuries. I was moved by the stoic optimism of the soldiers, the dedication and compassion of the doctors and nurses, one of them wearing a brave slash of lipstick.