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When E.M. Forster published Aspects of the Novel in 1927, he was not writing as a critic, and the success of the book is due to precisely that. Forster gives us the intuitive judgements of a novelist – a series of rough observations full of verve. James Wood’s How Fiction Works is indebted to Forster’s study and turns on like questions (what constitutes a convincing character? How does narrative style shape a novel? What defines a telling detail?). But while he poses theoretical questions, Wood does not offer theoretical answers. And unlike Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel (1985), Wood is not interested in the way writers gloss their own creations.

Whether it is the television, computer, Personal Digital Assistant or mobile phone, many of us spend a considerable proportion of our lives engaging with images presented on screens. Digital images are integral to television, film, photography, animation, video games and the Internet, and are used increasingly as the main medium through which we interact and communicate with each other.

Although we may be aware of the increasing cultural presence of images, less apparent are the changes in how we might think about them. In the new media landscape, images are no longer just representations or interpretations of our actions; they have become central to every activity that connects us to each other and to technology. Understanding the nature of the complex relationship we have with the images that surround us is the principal concern of Ron Burnett’s new book, How Images Think.

Frank Coaldrake was a significant figure in the history of the Anglican Church in Australia: a founding member of the National Union of Australian University Students; active in the Student Christian Movement; a member of the Bush Brotherhood, which ministered to indigenous Australians in outback Queensland; active in the Brotherhood of St Lawrence in Depression-era Melbourne; President of the Federal Pacifist Council of Australia; a missionary to Japan in the early post-World War II years; Chair of the Australian Board of Missions (ABM) from 1956; and elected as Archbishop of Brisbane in 1970, but tragically passing away before effectively taking up this office.

Levin’s God is a two-part epic. The first half is a take on the Australian rock scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Singer-guitarist Levin Hoffman, on the strength of what people say are ‘great songs’, rapidly takes his band the Barking Dogs to the top of the charts. Levin – believe it or not – finds that success is hollow and that not even his devoted Indian-Australian girlfriend, Shelley, or his long-time friend-cum-manager, Lawrence, can rescue him from his indefinable angst. The second half of the book sees Levin in Thailand, where, lying low at a monastery after witnessing a horrific murder, he becomes a devotee of meditation.

As Roger Hart, Roger Wells was the male lead in the group Little Heroes (not to be confused with their contemporaries, Little Murders), a Melbourne band that spent the first half of the 1980s making interesting rock records. They had a top ten hit, ‘One Perfect Day’, in 1982, which complemented the ‘new wave’ without alienating fans of more established music. Wells now works as a counsellor and has written a book on meditation, so one assumes that Levin’s God is built on a skeleton of experience, though much of the experience seems casually remembered. Tellingly, it is the travail of meditation and Levin’s struggle to purge his own desire and pain through meditative enlightenment that are most credible.

In 1984 British feminist Rosalind Coward published a collections of essays, Female Desire: Women’s Sexuality Today, which had considerable impact because of its explanatory power, and because it made available a particular interpretation of feminist approaches to everyday cultural forms, from food porn to astrology, fashion to romance novels. At that time, media representations and popular understandings of feminism were distorted and often stereotypical. They had not caught up on the more nuanced and diverse critical thinking filtering through the activist networks and academy. Coward’s book charted new directions in thinking through feminism and thinking about feminism.

The Anglican Church worldwide is currently facing the gravest threat ever to its international unity. Where the vitriolic debates over the ordination of women failed to shatter the Anglican Communion, the ordination of an openly gay bishop in the US in late 2003 may well succeed. Conservative bishops have demanded that the American Episcopal (Anglican) Church’s leaders be disciplined. If the Archbishop of Canterbury does not oblige once an international report has been tabled later this year, the break-up of the Anglican Communion is highly probable.

On his sixteenth birthday, Peter Hithersay discovers that his father is not his father. His mother’s husband, Rodney, has wanted to dispel this misunderstanding for a long time, but it has taken years for Henrietta to say what has needed to be said.

In 1960 Henrietta was sent as a substitute to compete in a Bach festival in Leipzig, one of the most musical cities in the world. Bach lived there for twenty-seven years; Wagner was born there; other musical notables, such as Grieg and Schumann, have been associated with the city. But Leipzig, two hours from Berlin, spent forty years last century at the heart of the GDR, the police state of East Germany. Leipzig was the hub of one of the most unmusical régimes imaginable, and became a stronghold for the notorious secret police, the Stasi.

Between the ages of twelve and seventeen, the name Morrison seemed to be almost everywhere I looked. Scraping and stumbling through Geelong College, I attended assemblies in Morrison Hall, was a member of Morrison House, and daily passed a trophy cabinet in which was exhibited a copy of Morrison of Peking (1967), Cyril Pearl’s biography of George Ernest ‘Chinese’ Morrison (1862–1920), a scion of the founding family in whom its pride was visible.

It would be nice to say that the example of Morrison’s life spurred me to tackle journalism, what he called ‘the noblest of all the professions’, with its emphasis on ‘energy, courage, temperance and truthfulness’. But truth be told, he was at the time a little too exotic to take in – as Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin put it in their new biography, ‘a Scot by breeding, an Australian by birth and experience, British imperialist by choice and a Sinophile by compulsion’. Only later did I find myself bewitched by An Australian in China (1895), the vivid pedestrian’s panorama that Morrison wrote about his foot slog from Shanghai to Rangoon, which became, as it were, his successful job application to The Times.