Readers who loved James Rebanks’s autobiographical The Shepherd’s Life: A tale of the Lake District (2015) – a bestseller at home and abroad, translated into sixteen languages, and winner of numerous prizes – will welcome this new work. His first book tells the story of a recalcitrant youth who wants nothing more than to leave school early to work on his parents’ and grandparents’ farm. Eventually, he resumes his studies, which take him to Oxford, and begins his richly evocative account of his life as a Lake District shepherd. What magnifies and deepens this apparently simple narrative and surely accounts for its universal imaginative appeal is that the work he describes is the continuation of a tradition going back more than a thousand years. Against the backdrop of the Cumbrian massif, daily human and animal preoccupations, hardships, and rewards – subject as they are to season, weather, and geography – have changed little since the last Ice Age retreated. In 2017, the Lake District was given World Heritage status, in part for its continuous agro-pastoral traditions.

I first encountered Race Mathews in the early 2000s, around the time of the publication of my biography of Jim Cairns. He struck me as reserved and cerebral, but generous. As national secretary of the Australian Fabian Society, he invited me to deliver a talk about the biography at the Melbourne Trades Hall. Following Cairns’s death in late 2003, Mathews initiated a Jim Cairns Memorial Lecture as a joint endeavour between the Fabian Society and several university ALP clubs. What struck me about this was that Mathews and Cairns had been from different wings of the Labor Party, the former probably the most fervent disciple of Gough Whitlam, a philosophical and leadership rival to Cairns, and yet here he was helping to preserve the memory of Cairns. It suggested a refreshing ecumenicalism, an open-minded, enquiring spirit.

In a 2010 interview, Tobin Siebers, the author of Disability Theory and Disability Aesthetics, argued that ‘[d]isability still seems to be the last frontier of justifiable human inferiority’. At the same time, he suggested, the evolution and success of modern art owed much to ‘its embrace of disability as a distinct version of the beautiful’: ‘No object has a greater capacity to be accepted at the present moment as an aesthetic representation than the disabled body.’ A central problem for Siebers was the disconnect between ‘two cultures of beauty’. Could the ‘aesthetic culture’ that celebrated disability influence the dominant ‘commercial culture’ that stigmatised it?

Raimond Gaita is quoted in his close friend Robert Manne’s new memoir as saying that a ‘dispassionate judgement is not one which is uninformed by feeling, but one which is undistorted by feeling’. That distinction points to one of the many attractive qualities of A Political Memoir: Intellectual combat in the Cold War and the culture wars.

James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University in New York, starts his new book with an epigraph listing two dictionary definitions of ‘playbook’: ‘[a] book containing the scripts of dramatic plays’, but also a ‘set of tactics frequently employed by one engaged in a competitive activity’. The Playbook turns on bringing these two definitions together. It argues that the Federal Theatre Project that developed in the United States between 1935 and 1939, as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program, was effectively scuppered by the political machinations of ambitious Texas congressman Martin Dies. In 1938, the wily Dies succeeded in setting up the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), with himself at its head. HUAC became notorious during the Cold War, under the direction of Joseph McCarthy, for its persecution of political dissenters. Shapiro’s thesis is that its nefarious influence began earlier, with the democratic principles he regards as inherent in theatre being peremptorily shut down by Dies’s political opportunism. Shapiro presents this conflict as a forerunner of more recent American culture wars driven by Pat Buchanan in the early 1990s through to Donald Trump in the present day.

The first morning on waking
I thought it was fog, or mist, I thought it had rained,
but the ground was dry. 

In this important book, Colin Golvan – a distinguished senior counsel – recounts some of the most notorious cases of copyright abuses endured by Indigenous artists, their work taken without permission, attribution, or adequate compensation and used on objects ranging from souvenir T-shirts to expensive carpets. An intellectual property barrister, Golvan leads us through the intricacies of these cases with lawyerly precision and poise, championing the role of copyright in bringing justice to Indigenous people.

‘Well, I always liked Madrid!’ is my father’s verdict on the city; a verbal shrug that manages both to damn with faint praise and gesture at a powerful, unspoken criticism. There is some truth in both: Madrid often finds herself crowded out of ‘Great Cities of the World’ lists and has struggled to win top billing as a tourist attraction, even within Spain itself. The perpetual bridesmaid, despite her official capital status (hello Ottawa, Ankara, and Canberra), she has long been forced to hold the glittering train of Gaudí’s Barcelona. It has taken the zeal and outsider’s gaze of a convert – the accomplished Australian writer and honorary madrileño, Luke Stegemann – to draw her from the shadows in a self-described ‘expression of love … and act of recovery’.

Part one of Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls – a homage to magical realism and some of its greatest proponents, including Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez – presents an unnamed narrator searching for truth in a fantastical library behind a guarded wall. The two further parts also explore the idea of the inhabitation of libraries. Indeed, this will be familiar to Murakami’s readers, for he has written about libraries before. For instance, in his children’s novella The Strange Library (1983) a schoolboy is imprisoned in the under-ground maze of his local library and told to memorise books.

Michel Houellebecq’s novels cover a lot of territory. His approach to writing is a totalising one, offering a complex picture of contemporary society, often including its prehistory and its near or sometimes distant future. Annihilation (first published in 2022 and now available in English) bears all the hallmarks of this approach: a description of a sad dinner where two government ministers discuss their failed marriages is interrupted by digressions on the current state of the European car market and the impact of recent constitutional reforms on the upcoming presidential elections; a hospital bedside visit is punctuated by reflections on the French medical system and a comparative analysis of Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. The novel features typical Houellebecqian characters who, in the author’s words, have reached a ‘kind of standardised despair’ and ‘the deterioration of reasons for living’.