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At first glance, the life of an art historian, often depressed in the latter decades of her life, might not yield a compelling book. But Colin Holden’s perusal of Ursula Hoff’s previously unknown diaries has produced a passionate and valuable portrayal of a scholar wrestling with the challenge of buying works of art for the National Gallery of Victoria, in London. The biography is based on Hoff’s diaries, still owned by her estate, and not yet in the public domain.

The People’s Train, a book that links Queensland to the Russian Revolution, comes with baggage. Not least, there is the mixed critical reaction Tom Keneally has endured over the decades. Perhaps most notably, he is forever to be hailed and damned as the author of Schindler’s Ark (1982). Keneally’s popularity seems double-edged: Simon Sebag Montefiore, a writer of books about Russia, breathlessly lauds The People’s Train as a ‘tremendous read and really exciting’, yet Keneally’s compulsive readability – surely cause for celebration – has somehow dented his reputation as a ‘serious’ writer.

Cate Kennedy’s début collection, Dark Roots (2006), marked a change in publishers’ thinking about the commercial potential of short stories, and helped create the atmosphere in which Nam Le was signed up for his bestselling collection, The Boat (2008).

Kennedy was well known in literary circles before her book was published; she has won several of Australia’s leading short story competitions, including the Age Short Story competition twice. Dark Roots gained her a public following and cemented her status as one of Australia’s most accomplished writers, regardless of genre. The stories in Dark Roots are master classes in style and precision: a series of lives intimately sketched by way of carefully chosen, closely observed detail and elegant metaphors. Now readers will see how Kennedy manages the tightrope transition to the long form in her first novel, The World Beneath.

Of all art forms, photography has probably had the most contentious and complex reception. Graduating from the ‘bastard child left on the doorstep of art’ in the 1840s to the darling of the art world for some 170 years, the critical understanding of this quintessentially modern medium is in a constant state of flux.

These thoughts occurred to me as I read this lavishly produced hardcover book. Indeed, as the rather prosaic title, states, this is photography that self-confidently declares itself as art. Blair French, who co-authored Twelve Australian Photo Artists with Daniel Palmer, brings one of the touchiest aspects of the medium to the fore when commenting on the work of Pat Brassington: ‘the relationship between photography and the world may appear transparent, but photography is in fact an opaque medium with its own material qualities ... it is an act of fabrication and construction.’ This is the sticking point that still brings the medium into contention: photography as a reflection of the world or as a construction. Or, to use a more crude conjunction, document verses art.

This is the same Barry Dickins who used to write a column for the religion section of The Melbourne Times. The religion section dealt with football, and Dickins covered the waxing and mostly waning fortunes of the Fitzroy Lions, who were long ago squeezed into amalgamation with Brisbane. Brisbane was never an inner suburb of Melbourne, a sore point with followers, many of whom wore black to the game. They looked like mourners. Dickins alone could describe all the griefs that held them together. He was and is an unparalleled celebrant of sorrow. He is the bloke you want to be around when you need jokes for a funeral.

Popes have long been wary of Church Councils, seeing them as possible rivals to their claim to absolute authority. When the Council of Constance met in 1414, there were three contending popes, each elected by a set of cardinals, and each with political support across Europe. At its end, two had been deposed, and the third, Gregory XII, having been recognised as pope, agreed to resign. A commission of Cardinals and others appointed by the Council then elected a new pope, Martin V, in 1417. Constance also decreed that the pope was to convene councils on a regular basis. Martin conformed for a time, but the practice soon fell away. Popes have preferred to govern alone, with the help of the Roman Curia.

Sir Maurice Bowra, renowned as the most lively and learned don in Britain, if not in all Europe, reigned supreme as Warden of Wadham College Oxford for more than three decades until his retirement in 1970. This long-expected biography, diligently researched for many years by the late Michael Davie, London-based author, journalist, and former editor of the Melbourne Age, has now been expertly completed by Oxford historian Leslie Mitchell, who writes with the ease and authority of a biographer thoroughly acquainted with his subject and the College over which he long presided: though not, perhaps, with the sharply quizzical eye that Davie, working outside that golden circle, might have trained on both.

Robert Wainwright and Paola Totaro’s Born or Bred? Martin Bryant: The Making of a Mass Murderer is a tendentious and poorly written book about a fascinating topic. Riddled with clichés and full of baseless speculation, it displays neither great sensitivity nor penetrating insight. Despite the important subject matter, Wainwright and Totaro have written a shallow and dubious book.

Bob Ellis’s lightly edited journal alternates between two main timelines spanning 27 June 2007 to 8 November 2008: that is, from the run-up to the last Australian federal election to Barack Obama’s victory. Ellis’s insomniac musings over these sixteen-odd months are brilliant and shambolic, irritating and moving. The book is essential reading, but you have to work hard for the gems.