The Cambridge Companion series has been a very successful venture, presenting readers with handy, up-to-date collections of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars on a wide range of authors and topics. This co-edited volume on British Romantic poetry encompasses many of the key topics in Romantic literary studies of the last two decades: historicism, canonisation, antiquarianism, Gothicism, the lyric, the rise of standardised English, women’s writing, colonialism, poetry’s relationship with the novel and with philosophy, and the legacy of Romanticism in contemporary poetry. There are also several essays which, in their originality and complex argumentation, cannot be so easily summed up and labelled: a brilliant reading by James Chandler of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ Ode as an important continuation of the eighteenth century’s ‘progress of poetry’ theme; an analysis of Romantic-era poetry which argues that the study of Romantic poetry belongs as much to media history as to literary scholarship; and an essay by Kevis Goodman which, by tracking the discursive migration of nostalgia from medical discourse into the heart of Romantic aesthetics, challenges the usual clichés of this period’s poetry as a de-historicising ‘exile from the present’, a poetry of return and retreat.

Roads are not places, but ways to and away from them, perhaps in fearful flight or in buoyant expectation. Travelling them can engender boredom (‘Are we there yet?’) and horror (‘Will we ever get there, alive?’). Roads are means of reaching those fabled and amorphous Australian locations – the city, the bush, the beach. Each of these has attracted anthologies (some from Penguin). Delia Falconer’s task, as editor of The Penguin Book of the Road, is less straightforward, being concerned with how we travel rather than where we arrive, with highways but also with indirect, crooked ways. In a masterly and challenging introduction, she warns us of what to expect.

Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear comprises a trio of essays commissioned by the Sydney PEN. According to its website, PEN is ‘an association of writers devoted to freedom of expression in Australia’. In this book, three major Australian authors discuss the roles that tolerance, prejudice and fear have played in contemporary Australian society. This is a society in which traditional ideas about national identity and race have been variously championed and attacked. The result is thought-provoking and engrossing.

The text opens with Christos Tsiolkas’s essay on tolerance. Tsiolkas argues that it is no coincidence that a liberal ‘politics of tolerance’ has become popular during an historical period in which neo-conservatism has flourished. Gideon Haigh follows with an essay on the cultural ‘narcissism’ that swept through Australia during John Howard’s eleven years as prime minister. During this period, Haigh argues, Australian culture became ‘shallow, thick-skinned, aloof from the world’s problems, impervious to the sufferings of others – then retracting in angry confusion at the hint of questioning, raging petulantly when crossed …’ The third piece is Alexis Wright’s analysis of the harmful and infectious nature of fear. This is a topic that both Tsiolkas and Haigh raise at different points in their essays. Wright argues that Anglo-Australians have long been socialised to fear ‘Aboriginal people and … law’, while a ‘fearfulness of white Australia’ has arisen within Aboriginal culture. Wright concludes her piece by arguing that literary fiction can offer an effective mode of political resistance in a period when both major political parties in Australia are essentially singing the same neo-conservative tune.

Eighty-four is a good age. To die then is not a tragedy, or at least no more than that the knowledge we must all die is the great human tragedy (some might think the alternative, to live forever, would be an even greater one). Donald Horne does not consider his death a tragedy, in this account of his dying. What pervades this thoughtful book, written by Donald Horne and his wife, Myfanwy Horne, is the sadness that comes from the endings of things; in this case, the ending of the life they shared. They both know the end is inevitable, but it is no less sad for that.

In someone else, John Hughes gives new voice to twenty-one famous men – writers, artists and musicians – who have influenced his imagination and his outlook on life. In this non-standard homage, Huges has written a series of what he calls ‘fictional essays’. Each piece delves into aspects of an individual’s thought and creativity, but Hughes does this through the prism of his own world view, his imagination, his preoccupations. The title recalls Rimbaud’s declaration, ‘I am made up of all who have made me’. When Hughes writes about his fictional version of Marcel Proust or John Cage or Mark Rothko, he is simultaneously writing about himself.

'Ours is a time when monstrous book-merchandising conglomerates ... are into readers like humpbacks into plankton.’ So thunders James Grieve in the third of fifteen essays in the slim but satisfying When Books Die. All respond to the title, the ‘subordinate clause premising a prediction’. The consensus here is that the book is unkillable, but Grieve looks on the dark side. Swatting a mosquito will never eradicate the fever, he writes. ‘The lethal virus nourished in the putrid medium of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion continues to flourish and kill ...’ If he could, Grieve would eradicate the works of Nostradamus, Gibran and David Irving. He mounts a powerful case for the crime of ‘perverting the course of truth’ to be entered into our statutes.

Inga Clendinnen came rather late to Michel de Montaigne, the man she acknowledges as ‘the Father of the Essay’. When the professional historian began reading the great amateur, she did so, Clendinnen admits, ‘in that luxurious mood of piety lace-edged with boredom with which we read the lesser classics’. The boredom quickly dissipated as the writer in Clendinnen met a master: ‘It is hard to explain what makes his essays so enchanting, but I think it is the lithe, athletic movement of a naturally intrepid mind.’

Thirteen scholars here have fun changing the course of Australian history, but this diverting exercise has the serious purpose of making the real history fresher, more complex and surprising.

Even the more implausible scenarios can have this effect. Marilyn Lake imagines Prime Minister Alfred Deakin declaring independence from Britain in 1908 and aligning Australia with the United States, which brings to our attention the high place in the Australian imagination accorded to the American republic as exemplar, potential ally and partner in the spreading of a vigorous white manhood across the new world. Ann Curthoys ponders the character and influence of feminism by imagining a men’s movement emerging in the 1970s.

In the week that Voting for Jesus landed in my letterbox, the Howard government announced that it was considering dollar-for-dollar support for state school chaplaincies, while, in New South Wales, fresh allegations surfaced of branch stacking by the state Liberals’ ‘religious right’ faction. Those perplexed by such developments in secular Australia will find novelist Amanda Lohrey a helpful, warm-hearted guide. Her colourful, impressionistic and approachable account of Australia’s religious right welcomes readers into a debate that some might previously have been inclined to dismiss as too confusing, or as marginal to secular concerns. Chats with academics, theologians and commentators offer a variety of angles. Far from adopting a didactic tone, the text beguiles with numerous questions that sound rhetorical but often remain unanswered.

In 1993, when he was editor of Quadrant, Robert Manne published a short essay, which is collected in his recent book Left Right Left (2005), called ‘On Political Correctness’. The essay rehearsed some familiar right-wing arguments against this ‘highly intolerant’ doctrine and the threat it posed to academic freedom. Manne’s political opinions have, of course, undergone a considerable realignment in the intervening years, and so has the national political landscape. While the term ‘political correctness’ has proved far too convenient to disappear completely, these days it is heard less often and is generally invoked with less heat. This is partly because, over the past decade or so, it has done its job of denigrating any leftish sounding opinion so effectively.