When I think of Bach, I recall powdered wigs, a dim, gilded hall, limelight burning on a stage, rouged cheeks, finely turned men’s calves in stockings. I am in the audience, I am in a box seat, I am holding a fan, but really, I am nowhere at all.

A scanning of programs on any streaming service will reveal that the phenomenon of the cult, both real and imagined, continues to fascinate the public imagination. One notorious historical example, and the subject of recent documentaries and a gripping TV series, is a group called The Family, which operated undetected from the late 1960s for over twenty years in a secluded rural property near Lake Eildon in Victoria. What makes this case so unusual is the fact that its leader was a woman: the glamorous, pathologically narcissistic Anne Hamilton-Byrne. Shockingly, as many as twenty-eight of the victims were children who were subject to brainwashing and sustained physical abuse. Discovered and released in 1987, many of those children suffered lasting trauma and some committed suicide. In a stroke of terrible irony, Hamilton-Byrne never faced justice for her heinous crimes because the law judged the testimony of the children to be unreliable.

The enduring legacies of Covid-19 have been linked to a post- or new-normal era defined by everything from chronic debt to the rise of Big Data and the lingering unease any of us might feel in a crowd. Those transformations are placed in fresh perspective by Sheilagh Ogilvie’s reminder that humanity has experienced a severe pandemic roughly every five generations since the Black Death scythed across Europe for nearly a decade from 1346. ‘History seethes with epidemics,’ Ogilivie writes. Her interest is in how societies have responded across that long time span. What resources have been mobilised to ‘control contagion’? What changed with, and can be learnt from, those cycles in humanity’s extreme if episodic vulnerability to microbes?

What was the point of a landscape’s allegories,
or the show of fractured bedrock in Bellini’s
Transfiguration, the way it caught the folding
and tightening, the rough-shod squeezing of old
strata, and the intrusion of the igneous, ferns’

Few people in Australia will disagree with John Lyons that the war in Ukraine is ‘morally unambiguous’ and that the Ukrainian people have right on their side. A Bunker in Kyiv tells how they have mobilised en masse, volunteering to serve not only on the battlefront and in defence production but also in support roles across the economic and social spectrum. As for their enemies, Ukrainians have come to view Russians solely as ‘invaders, not people’. For Lyons, the conflict is a simple one between good and evil, and his underlying message is that both morality and self-interest dictate that the international community should step up its support for Kyiv.

Imagine having a performance review conducted by your employer while you were in a coma and on maternity leave and being told on your return to work that your responsiveness was found wanting. This anecdote is related straight-faced by Sarah Wynn-Williams in her whistleblowing account of the multinational technology giant Facebook. Based on the author’s seven-year tenure as Facebook’s Director of Global Public Policy, which ended in 2017, Careless People provides new insights into Facebook’s treatment of employees and users alike. As Wynn-Williams recalls: ‘A quick google search confirm[ed] my suspicions that you are not supposed to be given a performance review on your maternity leave. In fact, I understand that pushing someone to work during their maternity leave is against the law.’ A chilling picture is constructed of the human cost of the company’s lawless commitment to power, profit, and a galactic technocracy, the Metaverse.

The First Cold War is an account of 300 years of British-Russian relations, from mutual incomprehension to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which reached an accommodation between the great powers. This proved remarkably stable and provided the basis for resisting German aggression in the twentieth century. It only ended in 1949 when the next cold war began.

Science communication is a basic skill for all scientists, even if it is mostly performed for a restricted academic audience. Nonetheless, all scientists must also write for broader audiences – and some have turned this into an art form. Such practitioners of accessible ‘scientific writing’ have a slightly different task to the ‘science writing’ of writer/journalists who report on, rather than from within, the field. Popular scientific writing engages not just the general public, but also other scientists. Such long-form writing often generates new insights and knowledge by synthesising broad fields of fragmented or isolated disciplinary components, thereby creating new paradigms. These are often the books that change the way we see, think about, and study the world.

Kirli Saunders (OAM) is a proud Gunai Woman and multi-award-winning writer, artist, singer-songwriter, and consultant. Kirli creates to connect, to make change. She was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for her contribution to the arts in 2022. Kirli is the author of eight books, including Bindi (2020), Returning (2023), Afloat (2024), and Eclipse (2025). Her theatre show Yandha Djanbay will tour in 2026.

‘The time is out of joint,’ says Hamlet. And, as Jacques Derrida tells us in Specters of Marx (1993), it is also ‘deranged, both out of order and mad. Time is off its hinges … off course, beside itself, disadjusted.’ If time was deranged thirty years ago amid the AIDS crisis and the Balkan wars, in the wake of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ and the first Gulf War, the times have now mutated, become radically other again and again. There is before Covid-19 and after, before generative artificial intelligence and after. There is time before the return of fascism as a global phenomenon and time after: time now as authoritarians surge to power on promises of a return to pasts not only unreachable (and, for many, undesirable) but which never existed in the ways they are now imagined.