In the late twentieth century, museums throughout the world faced a number of challenges. Confronted with a plethora of flashy new technologies, they struggled to overcome a perception of irrelevance and fustiness. Bureaucrats demanded that museums pay their way, entertain the masses, and meet the growing expectations for instant gratification and information without effort.

Narrative and Media provides a lengthy and extensively researched overview of one of the central features of contemporary popular culture. The four authors (all of whom have been scholars at Sydney University) discuss the roles that narrative has played in mediums such as television, cinema and radio. In the introductory chapter, the authors explain the importance of their topic: ‘In a world dominated by print and electronic media, our sense of reality is increasingly structured by narrative.’ Later chapters address issues such as ‘narrative time’, ‘print news as narrative’, and the impact upon narrative conventions of postmodern and post-structuralist thought. In doing this, the authors also provide a ‘consideration of industry-related issues that affect the production and consumption of media texts’.

This book has one of the most beautiful covers you could hope to see: a Margaret Preston woodcut of Sydney Harbour, in rich blue, scarlet and ivory. Nor does the inside disgrace the exterior. It is a long time since anyone attempted a history of New South Wales, more than a century according to the blurb, presumably a reference to T.A. Coghlan’s annual publication, The Wealth and Progress of New South Wales, the last edition of which appeared in 1901. Beverley Kingston is highly qualified to do the job, and the twentieth-century detail is especially good.

Philistinism and anti-intellectualism enjoy each other’s company so much that it can be bracing to be reminded that it is possible to be both an intellectual and a philistine. That, at least, was a charge levelled at the British Fabians by some former members of the Fabian Society – and by some historians too quick to take those apostates at their word. The Fabians had unimpeachable intellectual credentials, but their preoccupation with policy, the mechanics of municipal and national government, and strategies for getting their policies implemented (initially by ‘permeating’ existing political parties, and later, in the case of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, through the Labour party) was such that they could appear ascetic and unmoved by the pleasures – and the potential – of literature and the arts.

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.

Henry Handel Richardson, author of iconic Australian novels The Getting of Wisdom (1910) and The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney (1917–29), has not fared well at the hands of her biographers. Axel Clark’s account of her early life, though kindly and well intentioned, could not seem to avoid the unfortunate conclusion that Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson (1870–1946) was a rather unpleasant person. At the age of four, Clark tells us, she was ‘unusually showy and forward’, and it was all downhill from there. As a girl, she was ‘overly insistent and overbearing’; as she grew older, she became self-aggrandising and embittered.

This Encyclopedia – claimed by the publishers to be the first for Melbourne – is an immense undertaking. The sheer numbers are staggering: 1500-odd articles, 850,000 words, 250 illustrations, nineteen maps and twenty-one tables, produced over a period of nearly ten years by an army comprising two principal editors, five associate editors, fifteen working parties and 440 authors (to say nothing of administrative and publishing staff). Fourteen notable residents offer more reflective pieces on ‘My Melbourne’, ranging from Stephanie Alexander on ‘Eating Melbourne’ and Barry Dickins on St Paul’s Cathedral (his ‘favourite place of anarchy’), to Barry Humphries’ elegiac meditation on ‘the days of Gladstone bags and gloves and hats and glads, / Before Melbourne had been Starbucked, and the trams plastered with ads’.

The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms, to take a random example, indicates the challenges facing anyone undertaking a definitive and detailed account of modernism. According to the Dictionary’s author, J.A. Cuddon, modernism is: ‘A comprehensive but vague term for a movement (or tendency) [that] pertains to all the creative arts, especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music and architecture.’ As he notes, it is a matter for debate as to whether modernism, ‘as an innovative and revivifying movement’, was essentially over by the late 1940s or persisted well beyond that period. The ‘vagueness’ of the term ‘modernism’ and of its definitions reflects the diversity of artists, works and ideas that it encompasses; and the implicit contradiction of Cuddon’s pairing of the adjectives ‘innovative’ and ‘revivifying’ is suggestive of modernism’s emphasis on both radical originality and engagement with (rather than uncomplicated rejection of) the past.

In the winter of 1968–69 the buildings of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt – the symbolically resonant home of what had come to be known as the Frankfurt School – were occupied by students. The police were called in, and Theodor W. Adorno, one of the great radical theorists of the twentieth century, pressed charges against a young man whose doctoral work he was supervising. Two months later, a group of women forced their way into Adorno’s lecture, handed out leaflets proclaiming that ‘Adorno as an institution is dead’, and ‘surrounded him, strewing flowers, performing a dumb show and … baring their breasts’. In action after action, the contempt of the students for the radical theorists of an older generation was made clear.