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Handbooks are not new to philosophy, but the twentieth century’s final decade witnessed the start of a publication flood. Encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks and companions began to appear in unprecedented quantities. It is tempting to attribute this phenomenon to some fin-de-siècle anxiety – Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? – but the principal explanatory factor is probably more mundane: in the face of an increasingly unsurveyable range of journal articles, collections and books, there was a correspondingly burgeoning need among students for guidance, and among professionals to share the labour of keeping up.

A thematic offering on sexuality from Australian Historical Studies (AHS) and an assortment of political history from the Australian Journal of Politics & History (AJPH). The first promises a diverse collection of articles that ‘not only speak productively to each other but also provocatively continue the project of putting historically framed sexual questions, and sexually framed historical questions, into scholarly debate’ but actually delivers something more modest. The second lacks this kind of thematic ambition, yet manages to surprise us with the weight of its straightforward historical sensitivity.

To prove the fairyness of tales, this world’s relationships start at ‘Happily’ and only then progress to their trials. The Park Bench tells what happens when hope of the ‘ever after’ fades into that space bordered by numb disappointment and the aggressive need to regain sensation. In gay fiction, that place is no man’s land.

Major historical figures generally attract multiple biographies. Napoleon and Nelson have, reputedly, amassed more than 200 biographies each – with successive waves of interest reflecting the constant need for reinterpretation. But at some point we must strike a declining marginal utility as we tally the titles – biography as running soap opera appears a postmodern accoutrement. In Australia, we have not yet managed to produce a biography of each prime minister – then along comes another on the ‘Little Digger’ Billy Hughes (1862–1952), without doubt one of our most colourful political leaders and written-about subjects. If not 200 titles, then there is certainly a small bookshelf full of respectable studies and serious essays on him, not to mention his own books and the many cameo appearances he makes in political memoirs and other works of his generation. So, do we need another interpretation? Indeed, does this ‘short life’ of ‘King Billy’ offer a new interpretation? Why did Aneurin Hughes – his namesake but no relation, and more on that later – commit to this laborious project?

It is one of the ironies of Jewish life in Australia that it is at once thriving and dying. The Jewish community drew its contemporary renaissance from the influx of postwar Jews from major centres in Eastern Europe, which were annihilated by the Nazis and their collaborators. Mostly victims of anti-Semitic persecution, the immigrants of the 1930s to 1950s brought a deep awareness and love of their culture and religious practice to an agreeable Australia, bolstering a Jewish community which to that time was predominantly British in origin and largely assimilationist. As Suzanne Rutland points out, in what is essentially a book of record, the immigration from Eastern Europe revitalised Jewish life in Australia.

While the imminent demise of the Australian novel continues to be predicted in the pages of the nation’s broadsheets, a curious thing is happening: two Australian publishing houses are creating new fiction lists. Australian Scholarly Publishing will present its fiction titles under the imprint Thompson Walker, and the University of Western Australia Press has come up with a New Writing series to showcase work from the postgraduate creative writing programmes of Australian universities.

Art research is an absorbing occupation, not for the faint-hearted. The researcher must brave airless libraries, wrestle with gigantic volumes of old clippings from The Bulletin or the National Times, and listen to ubiquitous taped artist interviews by Hazel de Berg, all the while perched on precarious stools and suffering under low-wattage globes.

Plastered makes an ambitious claim for band posters ‘as barometers of cultural relevance [which] can offer real-time social commentary and political satire’. Although the book never quite substantiates this claim, it is a valuable work, not least because of its beautiful reproductions of band posters. Most of the posters derive primarily from the collection of Nick Vukovic, an inveterate collector. Vukovic is so keen to show off his collection that even posters of little artistic value, ‘designed to get bums off seats and nothing more’, are impeccably and inexplicably reproduced in the book.