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This is, of course, a much-awaited biography. Its subject, the commercial broadcaster Alan Jones, has long been a contentious figure. While some believe his influence over his audience has actually determined the outcomes of certain state and federal elections, others believe that this influence is a self-perpetuated myth that Sydney-siders should repudiate. Chris Masters, the author, is something of a local icon; one of the most respected and fearless of Australian television journalists, whose professional integrity is widely acknowledged.

At the heart of Anna Wierzbicka’s book is the argument that what people now call World English is not culturally neutral; that it has embedded in it the Anglo values of its origin. Wierzbicka points to many seemingly ordinary English words, words that we would never suspect of being culturally distinctive, that have no equivalents in other languages. Anglo speakers will be surprised to discover that the values these seemingly commonplace words carry are not universals. Good and bad are universals, but right and wrong are not; the concept of fairness is Anglo, and most other languages do not have words that correspond to fair, fairness and unfair. Even at the level of verbal phrases such as I think, I guess and I believe, and in English’s proliferation of adverbs such as probably, possibly, apparently and conceivably, English differs from all other languages.

Richard Flanagan came to prominence some years ago like a collective delusion. Death of a River Guide (1994) sent a thrill through the literary community because of the raciness of its never-ending stories and in 1995, the baleful Year of Demidenko, we found ourselves giving the last of the Victorian Premier’s Prizes for new fiction to the Tasmanian arriviste who wrote fabulism like a Douanier Rousseau among the thylacines. Not long afterwards, Flanagan persuaded the producers to allow him to direct the film of his second novel, The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997) with nothing but a few supervisory tips from Rolf de Heer by way of experienced guidance, a feat of Cocteau-like virtuosity or snake-oil powers of persuasion all but unprecedented in national (let alone Tasmanian) history.

So many recent books have been about failure of one sort or another that when I read Michael Zifcak’s My Life in Print, with its eminently successful life story, I was at first inclined to scan it for points of criticism. Such is human nature. There are points, of course – the book is really two quite separate texts. The first, and most compelling, is the account of Michael Zifcak as a boy in rural Slovakia, then a youth and young man of estimable drive and a sharp, organising mind, who sets himself the task of improving his life – rapidly. Through a great deal of self-study and application, he gained his accountancy qualifications and pushed himself into a key position with one of the country’s leading manufacturers (ALPA, an ‘elixir’ with impressively high alcohol content), all this during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the ensuing German occupation of Czechoslovakia, World War II and the postwar Soviet takeover.

Love, family, hope, death and grief have always been among fiction’s chief concerns. The Gospel According to Luke and Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls, both second books from their authors, share many of these themes. The Gospel According to Luke adds faith, belief, religion and prayer; and Emily Maguire adroitly pulls off what would, in lesser hands, be a farce.

The year is 1806. While pacing the Cobb at Lyme Regis, the tall and windswept Laura Morrison exchanges keen glances with the intense Mr Templeton, but he fails to meet later appointments, leaving Laura in the lurch.

Occasionally, a television series on history is accompanied by an excellent book. Jacob Bronowski, anchorman for The Ascent of Man (1973), produced a book of the same name, the more remarkable because it lucidly explained complicated topics in the history of science. John Kenneth Galbraith’s challenging and quietly amusing The Age of Uncertainty (1977) came from another BBC series. Now the history of the twentieth century – or essentially the first half of it – is told and interpreted in this fascinating book by Niall Ferguson, a talented British historian who is a professor at Harvard University.

In Alice Pung’s memoir of her childhood, Unpolished Gem, her young self is drawn into a conflict between her mother and grandmother, both Chinese-Cambodian refugees. The child becomes a double agent, informing each about the other, until her mother accuses her of ‘word-spreading’ and threatens suicide. The child frets over her breakfast: ‘I always spread my jam on toast all the way to the very edges – no millimetre of bread is left blank and uncovered. My word-spreading habits are similar.’