Most of The Hamlet Doctrine is taken up with exegeses of key philosophical and psychoanalytic interpretations of Hamlet. For readers familiar with continental philosophy and critical theory, there is much to engage with here.

‘Our marriage wasn’t always unhappy’: so begins this ‘memoir of a marriage’ between Australian writer Mandy Sayer and her first husband, the Afro-American poet Yusef Komunyakaa. What follows is the chronicle of a deeply troubled relationship from the point of view of the poet’s wife.

Walter Benjamin was born on 15 July 1892, mere hours after the commemoration of Bastille Day. It is hard to avoid making something allegorical of this insignificant contingency, given that for the rest of his relatively brief life Benjamin would almost invariably arrive a little too soon or a little too late.

It cannot escape notice that, by King’s telling, things really start to go screwy when a much wider range of people get access not merely to politics, but to the political self-expression that was hitherto the preserve of the author… his sometimes acute analysis of particular deployments of notions of offence treats them as akin to an act of state censorship, a charge the Right relies on almost obsessively.

As Tom Keneally observes in his contribution to A Country Too Far: Writings on Asylum Seekers, governments of both persuasions have designed policies on the supposition that ‘people can be frightened out of trying to escape terror or likelihood of death’, an assumption shared by many people in the community. Yet when we understand the horror so many are fleeing and the fact that there is no protection worthy of its name in our region of the world, we can understand why travel to Australia is often the only option.

After an extraordinary series of events almost unparalleled in the modern history of the media, the Select Committee called before it one of the most powerful men in the world. There, in scenes of high drama and low farce, Rupert Murdoch, the emblematic media mogul of the late twentieth century, was asked by British lawmakers to account for the crimes of his minions.

The death of Stephen Ward stands as an iconic moment in British history, when the establishment, confronted by a new liberalism, had its hypocrisy exposed by a heady cocktail of female sexuality (a threat then, a threat now), race and politics.

Kenny was at home in Redesdale, country Victoria, on Saturday 7 February 2009. By mid-afternoon, an advancing column of smoke could be seen from his old farmhouse. He was prepared to defend what he describes as ‘most of my life … this house, library, paintings – my own and those by others – manuscripts, notebooks, sketchbooks, correspondence, photographs, family heirlooms’.

Albert Camus’ reputation, for good or bad, has been built upon cliché. This has resulted, for generations of readers, in a curious blindness when approaching his books. It seems simpler to repeat the cliché than to consent to what is actually spelled out on the page.

Electorates are not enamoured of the idea that the nation state now has such limited power over its destiny. Democracies dependent on foreign creditors; massive multinational companies subject to few democratic controls; an international financial market with the power to decide the strength of currencies – these things sit uneasily with the idea that a nation should be able to determine its own fate and the fate of its people.

At first glance, the hero-figure of both Louis Nowra’s ‘biography’ of Kings Cross and Tony Moore’s history of Australia’s bohemians is the urban flâneur, but their approaches to this chameleon subject are as disparate as their divergent purposes.

What this collection most clearly documents is Calvino’s tireless activism in the service of ‘the renewal of the Italian cultural climate’. In the letter he wrote to the influential Marxist literary magazine Il Contemporaneo in 1956, for example, he acerbically critiques the way it fails to keep up with contemporary Italian literature…

In Fukushima: Japan’s Tsunami and the Inside Story of the Nuclear Meltdowns, Willacy writes about small towns like Rikuzentakata and Namie, where the destruction of the earthquake and the tsunami meet the invisible radiation menace. His book is an important contribution to the understanding of Japan’s ‘nuclear village’.

One of the most intriguing – and largely unanswered – questions posed by Carey in Moving Among Strangers is: ‘Why did my mother correspond with a young man, an adolescent, thirteen years her junior, who wasn’t even a relation?’ Perhaps, she muses, they both felt like outsiders in the West Australian community.