I have beliefs about what you believe. I also have beliefs about what I myself believe. The big difference between the two cases is how I come by these beliefs. By and large, my beliefs about what you believe come from observations of your behaviour (understood in a wide sense, which includes the environment in which your behaviour is located). Here are two illustrations. You sell all your shares and buy gold. I infer that you believe that gold will outperform shares. You write an article saying that the Coalition will win the next election. I infer that you believe that the Coalition will win the next election. However, my beliefs about what I myself believe don’t usually come from observations by me of my own behaviour. My belief that gold will outperform shares may explain why I sell all my shares and buy gold, but it doesn’t reveal to me that I have this belief. Likewise, I don’t need to write an article saying that the Coalition will win the next election in order to discover that I have this belief. There is, to borrow some jargon, a first person–third person asymmetry in how we arrive at beliefs about beliefs.

In 1579, with the publication of The Shepheardes Calendar, Edmund Spenser (c.1552–99) burst onto the English literary scene. From the beginning, he was one of the oddest of great writers. The Calendar was a work of remarkable ambition. Spenser’s unlikely shepherds ‘piped’ poems to each other, using a pseudo-archaic dialect and a variety of elegant verse forms. The nature of Spenser’s talent was already apparent: his fascination with time and pattern, his extraordinary facility with words and verse forms, his combination of melancholy nostalgia and bold ambition. For, if the Calendar was characterised by a tone of complaint, it also showed a new and deliberate concern with fame. 

Ambitious, arrogant, talented, brave, learned, truculent, and convivial: Ben Jonson was too outstanding, too odd, and too contrary to be taken as a creature of his time. Yet he had so wide-ranging a life that to write his biography is to capture, in little, a great part of his remarkable age.

‘One would have to be extremely naïve not to know immediately upon entering his room what was what when one saw the decoration with its reproduction Greek statues of hermaphrodites, and its strange collection of pictures, each boasting a posterior, mixed with pictures of pretty young men from the local garrison which the talented dilettante has made himself and continues to make.’

Australian universities have long taught early modern (c.1500–1750) English/British and European history, but with Alexandra Walsham’s recent appointment as the first female to occupy a Cambridge history chair, there are now (with Oxford’s Lyndal Roper) two Melbourne-trained early modernist Oxbridge professors ...

The argument of Self Impression, if it has just one, is that literary modernism, despite T.S. Eliot’s decree that it should strive after objectivity and impersonality, was more or less continuously involved in experiments with forms of life writing: autobiography, biography, memoir, journals, letters, and diaries. But Max Saunders is not interested in the obvious – Paul Morel as a version of young Lawrence, Stephen Daedalus of young Joyce, and so on.

The ‘secret language’ of the title of this book covers many kinds and levels of secrecy (things hidden and concealed), and a similar range of languages. The reasons for secrecy in language are manifold, the book argues, and Barry Blake gathers into his survey a vast range of material that illustrates how people can be oblique or indirect in their uses of language, which can be characterised by the blanket term ‘secret’. While the primary focus is on English, Blake often uses examples from past languages (Latin, Greek, Old Norse), from geographically dispersed languages spoken today, and especially from the Australian Aboriginal languages that were his field of expertise when Professor of Linguistics at La Trobe University.

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.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder and taste is subjective, why is there often overwhelming agreement that a particular thing is beautiful? Are tastes shaped by brain structure, unconscious psychic drives, society or culture? For almost half a century, the idea of innate, universal and cross-cultural aesthetics has been hotly contested in art theory and cultural studies. Now Denis Dutton argues that our aesthetic responses are instinctual. He has timed his book well. Freud has fallen from favour, post-modernism is generally despised and Darwin studies are on the rise.

In a delightful memoir of a boyhood spent in Mussolini’s Italy, Umberto Eco recalled that the heady days of the Liberation in his small town near Milan were encapsulated in the taste of Wrigley’s Spearmint, given by an African-American GI (New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995). After the years of ‘palefaces in blackshirts’, these Americans appeared like exotic time travellers from the future. At the same time, the boy discovered that, unlike the long-winded Duce, large slabs of whose bombast schoolchildren were expected to commit to heart, the leader of the local partisans addressed the cheering crowd in the piazza with a few well-chosen and rhetoric-free words. Equally astonishing was the discovery that newspapers could carry opinions other than those mandated by the state.