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Any novelist prepared to name one of his characters ‘Fish Lamb’ and to have that character come back from the dead is obviously interested in Christianity on some level. It is also true that several of the big themes that run through Tim Winton ‘s fiction – guilt atonement, forgiveness – have a religious flavour. Nevertheless, Winton’s symbolism tends to have an open-ended quality. When his characters experience moments of spiritual awareness, moments that Winton has said are meant to be taken literally, these experiences are often depicted as a nonspecific form of mysticism or pantheism.

His handsome and expanded edition of John Carroll’s Humanism (1993) is given added weight by an epilogue about the meaning of September 11. It can now be read alongside his recent The Western Dreaming (2001), which tried to chart a way out of the spiritual atrophy of late modernity in which, as this book argues, the unfolding of humanism from the Renaissance on has left us – with its egoistic individualism, its rationalistic blindness to limits and its rancorous hostility to the sacred.

This is a big, bold book with an enormous scope: almost two centuries of sex, birth control and heterosexual relations. It is an ambitious project, but Hera Cook has produced an intriguing mix of broad survey and close, detailed analysis. The basic premise of The Long Sexual Revolution is that sex and reproduction were intertwined. ln many histories, sexuality and reproduction are discussed as if the two were unrelated, but Cook indicates the ways that contraception and control over reproduction were crucial to both sexual pleasure and sexual change.

For those of us drawn to tell the stories of the past, seventeenth-century England has a great deal to recommend it. It is distant enough to offer the frissons of historical exotica, yet so close that the minds of the time are recognisable to us. In addition, it is hard to think of a period in one country so packed with incident. Where else, in a single lifespan, can a novelist convincingly have his character experience wars – both foreign and domestic – fire, pestilence, regicide and Restoration?

This, of course, is literary Archibald Prize and, just like the art competition that annually sets Sydney’s cognoscenti abuzz, it will provide grist for plenty of arguments. Which of these profiles catches a passably good likeness of its subject? In which are the brush-strokes boldest and most compelling?

For more than twenty years, Bruce Ruxton was Victorian president of the RSL, and one of the best-known names in Australia. ‘Best-known’ does not necessarily mean ‘best-loved’; few public figures cut so clear a chasm between supporters and detractors. Knowing Ruxton well over many years, let me declare that on the day I meet another man who equals him for kindness of heart and dedication to the welfare of others, I’ll take my hat off to the second man, too.

Frederick Septimus Kelly – pianist, composer, Olympic oarsman, gallant officer and Australian – was killed at Beaucourt-sur-Ancre during the final battle of the Somme on 13 November 1916. Only a few weeks before, he had been enjoying ‘the most delightful still bright autumn weather’ and the unexpected loveliness of the French countryside, strangely removed from the booming guns of war. Kelly was then thirty-five. One of the last men to leave the Gallipoli peninsula in January 1916, his bravery in the front trenches before the evacuation had won him the Distinguished Service Cross. As a boy in Sydney, he had demonstrated a precocious musical talent, ‘playing Mozart and early Beethoven piano sonatas before he could stretch the octave’. At the time of his death, this gifted man was moving into what promised to be a new period of fertility and confidence as a composer and performer.

First novels should be the hardest to write but, among writers, second novels have won that reputation. Second-novel syndrome can be identified by: obsessional mourning for the cocoon of anonymity; consuming self-doubt; chronic false starts; acute self-consciousness; the need for constant reassurance; and a low-level frustration brought on by mandatory participation in literary festivals.