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According to Aristotle, rhetoric is ‘the ability, in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion’. In today’s parlance, the term is often used pejoratively, connoting an obfuscation of truth. This would come as no surprise to Aristotle, whose treatise on the topic, Rhetorica, demonstrated an acute awareness of the dangers posed by the adroit manipulation of the means of persuasion for dubious ends.

Tasmania was named Tasmania, instead of Van Diemen’s Land, because of a need to push the island’s history back as far as possible beyond 1803. The Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman was usefully iconic partly because he had nothing to do with convicts. But yearning for a distant past, a past cut off from the present, was common among nineteenth-century Europeans. As John Stuart Mill remarked, ‘comparing one’s own age with former ages’ was suddenly an everyday habit. The fact that several generations divided Tasman’s visit from British settlement was almost an advantage.

He said, she said. Is there any way to talk about this sad subject without taking sides? And a thought for a reviewer: how to resist the temptation to find a book a ‘good book’ if you agree with its arguments, and a ‘bad book’ if you disagree? I disagree with most of what John Hirst has to say in Kangaroo Court: Family law in Australia, but I’m trying to be fair. The essay is lucidly written (indeed, its message could hardly be clearer); it is extensively, if selectively, researched; and it raises important matters that we, as a society, need to think about.

Books on language have been immensely popular in recent years. Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1999) was a study of the relationship between James Murray, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the insane citation collector Dr Minor. Winchester followed this with The Meaning of Everything (2003), a history of the Oxford English Dictionary project. In Australia, the reception of Don Watson’s Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language (2003) and of Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words (2004) demonstrated the general reading public’s interest in language matters.

Of all places on earth, Pitcairn Island must surely have the strangest history. Everyone knows about the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789 (not a bad year for uprisings) and about the settlement founded by the mutineers and their Tahitian consorts on this remote Pacific island. Now Peter Corris has created a fiction based on a distant family connection between Fletcher Christian and Corris himself, through his Manx ancestry.

With the greatest novels, you can plunge into them anywhere and still savour their greatness; it is recognisable on every page. You won’t need to have read the two earlier volumes of these edited diaries to recognise that same quality throughout the third – and I mean novelistic greatness, of which all the great diaries (from Samuel Pepys’s to James Lees-Milne’s) partake in important ways.

Alan Gould’s writing career began in the early 1970s when he was one of the ‘Canberra Poets’. This substantial selection covers thirty years and clearly shows both the achievements and the limitations of his work: I think the former outweigh the latter. One of the strengths of his poetry is a consistent vision; thirty years gives the opportunity for that to be explored in all its ramifications. The centre of this vision is history or, in its unintellectualised form, the past. Almost all the poems relate to this in one way or another. Even the later poems of humour or love or the waiting for a child’s birth are framed by the overriding meditation on the past, so that, though they are expressions of an intimate personal life, it is one conducted on the surface of the immense, slowly changing patterns of history.

I could always rely on Gerald Murnane for a beautiful quote. Nine years ago, when I was researching a piece on writers and technology, he told me he wrote all his books on a manual typewriter with the index finger of his right hand: ‘My favourite word to type, as a one-finger typist, is “afterwards”,’ Murnane told me over the phone. ‘It’s a beautiful whirly movement with one finger.’ Afterwards, as I transcribed his perfectly weighted sentences, it was clear that Murnane had probably already written the words he spoke to me. ‘I tend to think of words as written things rather than spoken things,’ Murnane writes in ‘The Breathing Author’, one of the more recent pieces in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, his first book in a decade. ‘While I speak, I often visualise my words as being written somewhere at the same time.’

Martin Krygier’s deft, discursive prose could persuade anyone except an ironclad ideologue that it is exhilarating as well as healthy to examine one’s prejudices and complacencies. Krygier is also a writer possessed of a frank openness that gives credence to the idea that you can judge a book by its cover. I suspect he’d also enjoy the piquancy of maxim busting. The cover of Civil Passions is a particularly beautiful one: a detail of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s 1338–40 fresco, the Allegory of Good Government. Its Giottoesque precision and its colour – those luminous Sienese pinks and reds – would be reason enough to use it. But there is a deeper fitness to the choice, and it has to do with what Krygier describes as his destined mode of being: one of hybridity.

This is not an airport read; anyone wanting colourful stories about Harold Holt’s private life will have to dig deep. Dr Tom Frame, Anglican Bishop to the Australian Defence Force, has written the first substantial biography of Australia’s seventeenth prime minister, who succeeded Robert Menzies in early 1966 and drowned on 17 December 1967. The Life and Death of Harold Holt, about ten years in the making, is a meticulously researched and scholarly work, and should become an essential reference for anyone interested in Australian politics and history. It wasn’t a commissioned work, but Frame deals with his subject sympathetically.