Harvard University Press

‘Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in’, declared Jane Austen, and so too do a number of Australian publishers. It is a commonplace that historians do not know how to write, except to each other in ways that put other readers to sleep. The first advice to the author of any newly minted doctoral dissertation preparing a book proposal is to eliminate all reference to the thesis. The starting point in any of the non-fiction writing programs offered at universities is to purge their manuscript of academic diction. ‘Sadly’, Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath begin their advice book on the subject, ‘historical writing has quite a bad reputation’.

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.

Providence, understood as God’s governance and care of the world, has an important place in religion. Church leaders speak of it with a view to giving comfort in adversity, especially when there has been large-scale loss of life, as in terrorist attacks or earthquakes. There is often some defensiveness in this appeal to providence because of the tension between belief in a loving and all-powerful God and the occurrence of what could be seen as preventable evil. Genevieve Lloyd – the first female professor of philosophy appointed in Australia, now retired – discusses providence in Christian belief, especially in considering Augustine’s thoughts, in late antiquity, on divine justice and the ‘ordering’ of evil, and Leibniz’s bold attempt, in early modernity, to reconcile divine providence with evil, and freedom with necessity, in ‘the best of all possible worlds’. There is attention, too, to Voltaire’s sharp critique of facile optimism, and to Hume’s sceptical probing of what can be known with certainty in these matters. More generally, Providence Lost explores the long tradition of philosophical inquiry, from the Greek tragedians to modern times, that gave rise to a range of different conceptions of providence in the context of human freedom, necessity, fate and fortune.

This is an exhilarating coverage of everything to do with the politics of the Middle East. Gilles Kepel takes the reader on a journey over the trouble spots and offers a bird’s eye view of the complexities of Islamic radicalism in the region. The book starts slowly but soon settles into a quick pace, taking the reader from place to place and event to event with case and mastery. Kepel does not shy away from displaying his intricate knowledge of Islam and the Middle East, a habit that might not agree with every reader; but it does help the novice to navigate the many issues that interweave into a grand narrative regarding the evolving nature of jihad.

In its 250 years of statehood, Afghanistan has gone through numerous episodes of political rupture. The principal causes of these upheavals have remained more or less the same: an underdeveloped economy and the inability of the rulers to shift from a tribal political culture, to a more participatory national politics based on modern and democratic national institutions and rules of governance. As a result, with rare exceptions, the rulers of Afghanistan have depended on foreign patrons and not on the human and material resources of the nation to rule. This political milieu of buying the support of tribal leaders has led to fratricidal wars of succession and pacification, with devastating consequences, resulting in extended periods of political and social unrest and lawlessness. These bloody conflicts, often called jihad by the contestants, have facilitated and even invited foreign interventions by the British, Russians, Pakistanis, Iranians, and now the Americans and their allies.

Gloria Davies quotes William Blake in the acknowledgments to her book: ‘true friendship is argument.’ When choosing that quote, I wonder if she had the Chinese concept of zhengyou in mind. That is the word Kevin Rudd chose for friendship when he spoke to the students at Peking University in April this year. Zhengyou is not just about friendship, for which there is another Chinese word (youyi); it defines a true friend as one who dares to disagree.

In 1964, newly appointed to the Department of English at the very new Monash University, I was uncertain about nearly everything. But as I unpacked my books in a pristine, sparsely furnished office, I found reassurance in the empty filing cabinet. I knew exactly how to fill its three drawers. As soon as I had some notes and a stack of manila folders, I would put poetry in the top drawer, fiction in the middle and drama down below. These three genres corresponded with the three terms of the academic year, as I had known it as a student. It was the natural order of things. That there might be a fourth drawer for biography, or even a space in the lecture programme for life writing, would not have occurred to me. This was the Leavis era – late Leavis indeed, but still preoccupied with close reading of literary texts. D.H. Lawrence’s mantra ‘never trust the teller, trust the tale’ seemed sufficient warrant for bypassing the teller altogether.

That scourge of religion, Richard Dawkins, declared recently that the past year had been a bad one for God. He was probably referring to the success of his polemics against religion and to the tidal wave of kindred writings by other public intellectuals, such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. We do not know whether God would agree; and whether we should agree depends partly on how we read ‘success’. The books certainly sold and are widely acclaimed, and may even have garnered apostates. But for all their élan and entertainment, they are essentially concoctions and elaborations of arguments and observations made by earlier, more penetrating thinkers. If advancing understanding is at issue, as opposed to securing the public’s mobile attention, then we should judge that the tree of knowledge hasn’t burgeoned much lately, not on the theological branches, anyway.

Toward the end of his life, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), French poet and founding father of Symbolism, published the prose collection Divagations (1897). This highly ambitious, eclectic work, a repository of Mallarmé’s aesthetic, revitalises the critical enterprise and shakes the very foundations of the literary act. His practice is inaugural, effecting a critique of the subject and of poetry that is unprecedented. Divagations shows the mature Mallarmé at the height of his achievement, inventing a new form of poetic journalism. From the outset, we are invited to read differently. These consummate, diverse pieces, comprising prose poems, lectures, journalism and portraits, are truncated from their original context and strategically redeployed. They illuminate each other differently and acquire a new potency, in tune with the poet’s vision of words in verse interacting like reflective jewels. The dazzling pieces on dance and current events provide a radical critique of contemporary values and show a sense of humour more familiar to readers of Mallarmé’s fashion journal. High and low interchange as the apparently trivial or frivolous acquires seminal status. The ‘Important Miscellaneous News Items’ offer some of the greatest examples of the new ‘Popular Poem’, celebrating the insight and autonomy of the modern reader.

As the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, Martha Nussbaum’s confident intensity is underpinned by a dazzling range of scholarship – politics history, psychoanalysis, economics, development studies, constitutional law, archaeology, comparative religion, comparative ethnology, pedagogy, gender studies, ethics – all focused in this book on intellectually annihilating a particular minority, the Hindu religious right in India and its supporters in the United States. Nussbaum’s personal background explains her fervour. Her mother’s family descend from the Mayflower, her father was a conservative Southern lawyer, and the family lived the secure life of Philadelphia’s main line. Martha rejected these satisfactions: ‘I was ill at ease with my elite WASP heritage.’ She became involved in the civil rights movement, and converted to Judaism when she married a Jewish linguist whom she met in a class on Greek prose composition. ‘I had an intense desire to join the underdogs and to fight for justice in solidarity with them.’