The new English edition of a selection of Harwood’s poems comes with an excellent editorial pedigree. With his co-editorship of Gwen Harwood: Collected Poems 1943–1995 (2003) and his editorship of A Steady Storm of Correspondence: Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood 1943–1995 (2001), Gregory Kratzmann has established himself as the foremost of Harwood scholars. As a major critic of Australian poetry, Chris Wallace-Crabbe was an early champion of Harwood’s poetry, with a particular affinity, demonstrated in his own poetry, for the wit and wordplay that are distinguishing marks of Harwood’s work.

In an intriguing coincidence, three recent novels by notable male writers feature central characters who, former members of world-famous rock bands, ruminate on the mess they made of the past. The notion of faded rock stars clearly provides much scope for exploring issues of male ego, sexuality and mid-life crisis. Unlike Nick Hornby (Juliet Naked) and Nick Earls (The Story of Butterfish), Steven Lang is no ‘lad-lit’ writer, though he does delve into similar thematic territory in his second novel, 88 Lines About 44 Women.

There is a timeless quality about some Australian authors that causes one to applaud when discerning publishers revive their work for new generations of readers. Wakefield Press’s reissue of Alan Moorehead’s The Villa Diana, first published in 1951, presents this fecund author’s book of essays, now subtitled ‘Travels in Post-war Italy’ ($24.95 pb, 224 pp, 9781862548459). It provides a neat introduction to Moorehead’s famous camera-like eye and his beguiling prose, which, as one commentator put it, offers ‘a long conversation that you wish would never end’.

Moorehead (1910–83) had already been anointed ‘the Prince of War Correspondents’ for his compelling reporting of World War II’s North African and European campaigns for The Daily Express, and was celebrated for his African Trilogy (1944) and Eclipse (1945), when he turned his back on journalism and the importunate Lord Beaverbrook, and moved in 1948 with his family to Tuscany. They lived in a rambling fifteenth-century villa outside Florence, near Fiesole. Here, the Australian expatriate, with his English polish, hoped to shape his dream of becoming a Renaissance man, or at least a ‘Mediterranean man’, refreshed by the arts and history of the high Renaissance.

It is genuinely hard for countries like Australia, which have never regarded a powerful and alternative intelligentsia as particularly crucial, to appreciate either the role such an entity famously played in Russia or what a homegrown one might offer.

In 1955 Boris Pasternak, son of a pianist mother and artist father, announced ‘the dearest and most important themes’ of his new novel Dr Zhivago: ‘land and sky, great passion, creative spirit, life and death.’ But in a country where harsh censorship quickly extinguished any spark of liberal thought, subterfuge was necessary. Pasternak typically used Zhivago’s love life to suggest, and veil, his critique of contemporary events: Yuri retains a nostalgic affection for Tonya, a daughter of the old régime and his first wife, but abandons her once he meets Lara, a free-spirited incarnation of revolutionary idealism. The failure of the Revolution is symbolised by Lara’s disappearance and the advent of Zhivago’s third wife, a dreary, downtrodden worker on the Soviet assembly line. The irony was that, although his message got through to the West, the novel remained unpublishable in Russia.