Peter Craven

The trouble is that The Bughouse is constantly outgrowing its own status as a work of interpretation without quite turning into the thing it might be – a biography which is also a work of intrinsic literary quality. What we tend to get is a kind of travelogue and personal journey into the environs of Pound’s incarceration.’

‘It doesn’t take long to realise that in The Noise of Time we’re not only in Russia, the fabled disnatured Russia of the Soviet and Stalinist dispensation, but in some gulag of the mind, some imprisoning sterility of the spirit. It takes a little longer — but the presentiment grows like recurrent music — and then there is the distinct realisation that we are reading a particular kind of fiction, a novel in which the writer has one hand tied behind his back.’

Daniel Mannix is the greatest churchman in Australian history, but he was far too much of a turbulent priest for the College of Cardinals. This was the man who opposed Billy Hughes’ referendum on conscription and won. This is the man who split the Labor Party down the middle in 1956 and did everything in his considerable power to keep it out of office.

Garry Wills is a great American political essayist and historian whose imagination has always been set on fire by the power of the word in the time of Elizabeth I. In his new book, he writes about it at length. And it is an extraordinary thing to try to imagine the Elizabethan moment and do justice to the majesty of its artistic achievements …

It seems, on the face of it, a bit bizarre that Blanche d’Alpuget should have written what is clearly the first of a series of novels about Henry II, and a bit odd too that she should have called it The Young Lion.

So there is a sense in which The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was an instant classic, like Psycho or A Streetcar Named Desire. How does it stand up? …more than anything le Carré had so far written, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a work of great moral power. It is full of complex, ambivalent emotion and a sense of the supremely pitiable, maybe even tragic, nature of human life.

Now, we have a new novel with the bizarre title (for Coetzee anyway) of The Childhood of Jesus. It comes with a cover of a young child in sunglasses and dress-up cloak and is like nothing on earth, and not much else in the history of literature.