At the heart of Required Reading is a database called ALIAS (Analysis of Literature in Australian Schools). It includes all the reading material prescribed for senior secondary English and Literature courses in most of the states from 1945 to 2005. Like all electronic databases, ALIAS comprises a structured collection of items to view, navigate, and search. To make meaning from these items they need to be framed in narrative terms. This is precisely what the chapters in this book achieve in the most interesting ways.

The editors of Required Reading invited leading authors in the fields of English and literary studies to use ALIAS to track and understand postwar changes in senior secondary school English and literature courses. By selecting, juxtaposing, and connecting items in the database, the contributors have created narratives about the texts set as literature in senior classrooms. The narratives are invested with the authors’ knowledge of curriculum histories, theories and practices of teaching, and histories of literary criticism and theory. The book represents the first large-scale study of what was set on English syllabuses in Australia and in which disciplinary, institutional, socio-historical, and pedagogical contexts.

With five illustrated field guides, two e-guide apps, and at least three photographic guides available to help people identify birds in Australia, some would question the need for yet another. The first field guide to Australian birds, written and illustrated by renowned bird artist Peter Slater, was published in 1970 and 1974 (two volumes). Since then, new guides have appeared roughly each decade. Given the purpose of field guides, good illustrations of each species are paramount, and these are invariably presented in plates, with a facing page of text pointing out the diagnostic characteristics of each species, and often a map showing where it occurs. Additional information on the species’ appearance, voice, habitat, distribution, and status are often provided in a separate section, and the ratio of such text to illustrated plates varies markedly among field guides around the world. The earlier Australian field guides tended to be overloaded with extraneous information, devoting as little as twenty per cent of their pages to illustrations, while more recent guides both here and overseas have moved towards fifty per cent plates, cramming all the relevant information onto the facing pages. A notable exception is the self-illustrated Michael Morcombe Field Guide to Australian Birds (2000), in which the nests and eggs of almost all Australian-breeding species are described and illustrated, an edifying but completely unnecessary addition to a field guide.

For a book that began as a tweet, Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India has had a remarkable journey, taking its best-selling author on a world tour, both to the centre of Empire in the United Kingdom, and its outpost in Australia. A career diplomat who retired as under-secretary general at the United Nations in 2001, Tharoor is now a member of parliament for the Lower House in Kerala and renowned both for his views, and his eloquence, on Indian history, geopolitics, economics, and international relations.

The book’s genesis has acquired mythic proportions by now and bears repetition: in 2015, Tharoor was invited by the Oxford Union to debate the proposition, ‘Britain Owes Reparations to Her Former Colonies’, and carried the day. He tweeted a link to the video of his speech, and the rest, as they say, is history. The tweet went viral, was downloaded and replicated on hundreds of sites, shared via email and Whats-App, topped three million views on a single site itself, leading to Tharoor being hailed by those who had previously ‘trolled’ him online, and to the publication of hundreds of articles arguing the pros and cons of his position and seminars that discussed the ramifications of what is now referred to as his ‘Oxford speech’. Persuaded by David Davidar, editor of one of India’s most intelligent publishers (Aleph), to write a layman’s guide to the well-worn and extensively written-about topic of British colonialism in India, Tharoor then embarked upon An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, published as Inglorious Empire in the United Kingdom, which sold more than 50,000 copies within six months of publication.

Zoological gardens are conflicted institutions. They provide a miraculous opportunity for close-ups with exotic and native animals one might never otherwise encounter. Yet they do so by keeping those very animals captive. The creaturely contact that zoos hope and claim can help transform citizens into advocates for animals and the environment is discomfited, if not entirely undermined, by the fact of dominion. Zoo biologists and keepers possess unique knowledge and skill in the breeding and care of wildlife, yet these were earned at the cost of generations of suffering and untimely death, and transform their subjects in still unknown and unacknowledged ways. Thus disquiet has long influenced the public debate over the merits of zoos whether entertainment, education, science, or conservation and their future place in societies is haunted by their role in defaunation and extinction.

Jenny Gray’s Zoo Ethics seeks to confront this disquiet and, by examining a range of ethical frameworks, to consider whether zoos can be justified. Whatever their capacities, she argues, all zoo animals are of moral concern: ‘duties and obligations result from the special relationships that have emerged from the entangled history, shared environment and vulnerability that arises when holding animals in captivity’. As might be expected of the CEO of Zoos Victoria and the incoming president of the world zoo governing body, Gray accepts reformist arguments for animal welfare but denies abolitionist claims of animal rights, in particular to liberty. That is, the ownership and use of animals are acceptable as long as unnecessary pain and suffering (both physical and psychological) are eliminated and each species’ complex needs, desires, and interests are met. In their techniques of care and replication of natural environments, she claims, zoos have made themselves capable of doing so.