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One of the things I am often called on to do as a bookseller is to make recommendations, particularly when it comes to fiction. This involves making a judgement about what a customer wants from a book, rather than what a book may want from its reader. Many readers declare from the outset that all they want from a novel is a good story they can escape into. They happily admit that they don’t want to be challenged, don’t want to work for their enjoyment.

This is the frequently offered rationale for mass-market fiction: pure escapism. It exists to entertain, not to edify. Hackneyed storylines and wooden dialogue don’t matter, so the argument goes; all that does matter is giving people the kind of uncomplicated enjoyment they crave. The writing might not be stylish, but neither is it pretentious. Fair enough, perhaps. If you are the kind of reader who sees nothing wrong with lines such as ‘a fresh spike of fear gripped him’ or ‘there was only one way to heal his thirst for revenge’ or ‘Iris has always been blindly attracted to people who don’t fit the mould’, then criticism of this book is probably redundant. If, however, mixed metaphors, clichés and melodramatic flourishes make you cringe, be warned that Fiona McIntosh’s Fields of Gold is full of them.

It is no secret that scholarly publishing is between a rock and a hard place these days. The rock is the proliferation of titles demanded by university research quanta and government assessment exercises. The hard place is the endless tightening of library acquisitions budgets. The result is ever-shrinking print runs, ever-growing covert or explicit publication subsidies and a rational but extreme conservatism in the commissioning habits of those academic presses that strive to remain quasi-commercial. Essay collections, in particular, have a hard time as book proposals, because, as publishers will tell you, people don’t buy them.

Cynthia Ozick’s most recent collection of criticism, The Din in the Head (2006), contains a brief but engaging essay called ‘Highbrow Blues’. It begins with her musing about a gaffe made by Jonathan Franzen following the publication of The Corrections (2002). Oprah Winfrey had selected Franzen’s novel for her televised book club, which was popular enough to turn any work she chose into a bestseller, but Franzen was uncomfortable with her program’s folksiness. He felt that the club’s reputation for featuring works of middlebrow fiction did not fit with his literary ambitions and that an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show was not likely to enhance his credibility. ‘I feel,’ he explained, ‘like I’m solidly in the high-art literary tradition.’ Brickbats flew from all directions. But why, wonders Ozick, did Franzen’s remark seem so jejune?

Each year, the board of the Australian Broadcasting Commission invites a prominent Australian to present the Boyer Lectures. The chosen expert offers his or her (mostly his) ‘ideas on major social, scientific or cultural issues’ to a radio audience and, a little later, to readers.

            Unsurprisingly, a review of the Boyers’ fifty-year history reveals undulations in quality and significance. While the concept has produced plenty of thought-provoking and prescient moments, often the interest is of a transient or an introductory nature. Certainly, few lecturers have matched the resonant and seminal contribution of W.E.H. Stanner’s After the Dreaming (1968), one of the finest pieces of writing produced about indigenous relations in Australia. Sometimes the choice of lecturer has been perplexing. In 2008, Rupert Murdoch’s A Golden Age of Freedom mixed rapacious optimism about technology, globalisation, and the future of the news media with a tetchy plea for Australia to shrug off its complacency. It would be hard to think of a person who needs the resources of a public broadcaster to disseminate his vision of the world less than Murdoch does.

Ever since Plato famously proposed to banish poets and their ‘embellished tales’ from his ideal Republic, the relationship between art and politics has been strained. On the negative end of the spectrum hovers the warning example of a failed Austrian landscape painter who proceeded to push the world into total war. What makes things even worse is that the remarkable appeal of Hitler’s ghastly vision in 1930s Germany owed much to the efforts of sympathetic artists such as Leni Riefenstahl or Gottfried Benn. But even more inspiring figures on the positive end of the spectrum – Václav Havel and Melina Mercouri come to mind here – usually fall from popular grace once they accept political office.

The sticker on the cover assured me that if I had enjoyed The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society I would ‘love’ Stillwater Creek. Had I been browsing the bookshop shelves, this would have been fair warning not to part with my money. Myriad readers obviously did love Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’s international bestseller. Alexander McCall Smith certainly did: he chaired the committee that recently voted it The Times WHSmith Paperback of the Year. TGLAPPPS bored me so much that I failed to finish it, but I can see why McCall Smith, who writes novels in a similar vein and with similarly whimsical titles, championed it.

A couple of anniversaries explain the occasion of this collection: one hundred and fifty years of responsible government in New South Wales, and the bicentenary of Lachlan Macquarie’s arrival as the governor who, Brian Fletcher argues, has had the most ‘persistent hold over public consciousness’ in reflecting the ambiguities of a convict colony. The volume is framed by Rod Cavalier’s foreword, which encourages a sequential reading of these thirty-seven essays, each part-biographical study of a governor and part-analysis of the evolving office. Such a course, Cavalier suggests, will show the position to be no sinecure but a ‘constant’ in the flux of politics. Even so, as civics tests regularly show, it is a position in need of rehabilitation if it is to rise above being a misunderstood curiosity.

It is time to raise our glasses: Australia’s oldest literary magazine is now a sprightly septuagenarian. The latest number of Southerly marks the occasion by encasing itself in what appears to be a reproduction of one of its covers from the middle of the last century, complete with foxing and a pencil notation of its pre-decimal price. This retro jacket should serve as a reminder of the journal’s longevity. It arrived on the scene at a time that was hardly auspicious for any new literary venture – Hitler invaded Poland the same month. Thankfully, Southerly outlasted the Third Reich (and a few other empires, too).

One of the most productive and interesting areas of research in applied philosophy is concerned with moral issues around warfare. Although there had been important contributions previously, Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars (1977) was immensely influential in philosophy and well beyond its confines, reinstating ‘just war’ thinking as a mainstream intellectual position. It became, for instance, a standard text in Western military academies.