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This is a book about a very specific past, that of the Third Reich, and the way in which it produced guilt in the next generation, but its lessons can be generalised. Bernhard Schlink shows how that guilt has withstood the institutional strategies of history, law and politics to erase it. Schlink, born in 1944, belongs to the generation burdened with the moral repercussions of the war and the Holocaust. Many of the parents, teachers, judicial officers, bureaucrats and professors who rebuilt Germany were implicated in Nazism, and many young Germans – Schlink among them – found themselves guilty by entanglement. This theme runs centrally through Schlink’s fiction – notably The Reader (1997) and Homecoming (2008) – and now through these six essays, given originally as lectures at St Anne’s College, Oxford.

Vivienne Kelly’s short story ‘Passion Fruit’ was included in The Best Australian Stories 2007. In 2008 she won The Australian Women’s Weekly/Penguin short story competition for ‘The Third Child’. Cooee, her first novel, is further confirmation of her remarkable talent.

In the deceptively simple opening, the reader is introduced to Isabel Weaving – grandmother, mother, sister, daughter and divorcée. Isabel, reflective and stubbornly opinionated, considers her various relationships with family, her ex-husband, and Max, her absent lover. The reader is lured into Isabel’s world as childhoods – her own and those of her offspring – are dissected with cold detachment; her failed marriage is dredged up and pulled apart. Her love affair with Max is remembered fondly, but not without trauma.

In 2004, the year after the US-led invasion of Iraq, Stefan Halper, a senior diplomat who had served Republican administrations from Nixon to Reagan, published America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, a celebrated and scathing critique of the neo-conservative influence on George W. Bush’s foreign policy. It was different after World War II, thought Halper, when US forces were welcomed as liberators. The occupations of Germany and Japan became models of what could be achieved. It is a theme that has found some resonance in the Obama administration.

To become associated, even identified, with a role or a certain kind of role may ward off the financial uncertainties of an actor’s career, but it undoubtedly also brings its limitations. Remember how ineffably lady-like Greer Garson appeared in her MGM heyday: I recall watching her narrow her eyes in Mrs Miniver and thinking that she could play Lady Macbeth if someone gave her the chance. No one ever did. Leo McKern wasn’t quite so effectively imprisoned by his ‘Rumpole’ persona, but it is at least on the cards that he will be remembered with such tenacity for nothing else.

A decade ago, when the number of dead mums in young adult fiction had reached epidemic proportions, I drew attention to the phenomenon via the pages of Viewpoint (Vol. 6, No.1), and called for a halt to, or at least a diminution in, the rate of literary matricide. I suggested that authors might find another way of generating sympathy for their young protagonists or, if they were determined to explore grief and loss, kill off other members of the family and give mums a break. For a while, the body count declined, but my recent reading suggests that the number of bereaved protagonists is on the rise again.

Midway through Steven Carroll’s beautiful and sombre novel The Lost Life, Emily Hale gives Catherine a pair of French stockings which she has decided she cannot herself wear. To Catherine, who is eighteen, ‘The thought of Miss Hale even buying them, let alone contemplating wearing them, is intriguing, for it opens up the possibility that there may be another side, many other sides, to Miss Hale altogether.’ One of the feats of Carroll’s storytelling is his capacity relentlessly but gently to prod his characters’ inner complexities – their many other sides. Somehow he slows time almost to a standstill, leaving the past and the future pressed hard up against elongated snapshots of the present. He hones in on incidents which often seem quite ordinary, transforming them into monuments to life’s ups and downs. It should be boring, but it’s thrilling.

Early winter: Robin is living with his father in the mountains. Where is his mother and why did she leave? This mystery drives the conflict between Robin and his father, who won’t tell Robin what he knows. The Nest is a family drama with a Gothic mystery at its heart. The tension between these elements – the unusual structure that Jennings has created to hold them together – gives the novel an odd power and surprising range. But The Nest derives much of its appeal from its account of daily life in the Australian snowfields, a setting with its own practical magic. The characters move from cosy rooms into wild and dangerous country. This contrast suggests the literary styles that Jennings brings together here: The Nest is a realist novel with Romantic images and themes.

The publication of John Kinsella’s The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry is a major event in Australian poetry. It offers a powerful, large-scale vision of Australia and its poetry. Reading Kinsella’s anthology during the great southern heat-wave of 2009 (before the week of Black Saturday), my understanding of both things became coloured by their accidental intersection. On the second night of the heatwave, Australian poetry buzzing in my head, I took my dog outside for his usual night-time wander around the front yard. The suburban streets were deserted, as they had been in the scorching heat of the day. But at night, this desertion, coupled with the unusual nocturnal heat, gave the suburb an uncanny quality, simultaneously familiar and strange. The only human sounds were the ghostly hum of air conditioners and, in the distance, the mournful noise of someone bringing in a wheelie bin.

What makes a good short story? Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn, editors of the fifth Sleepers Almanac, say there is no objective measure of quality; that everyone likes something different; and that they simply choose what appeals. As I sit down with their funky-looking volume, I don’t want to believe it. If that is the case, there is no place for literary critics, no real justification for academic literary study, and the premise for an editor’s judgement is shaky. Why should what they like matter particularly?