Clive James has been at the business of writing now for so long that his literary activities have almost outlived the fame that used to get in the way of their apprehension. Twenty or so years ago, it was possible to think that the man who clowned around in those ‘Postcards’ travelogues on television, and who seemed to reach some apogee of self-satisfaction and self-definition chatting to celebrities on the box, was just slumming it when it came to literature; that he had bigger fish to fry than this diminished thing, even, if he was forever reminding us of the grandness of the refusal he had made.

After all, the poems that had entered (highbrow) public consciousness were essentially jokes on the whole enterprise, weren’t they? ‘Last Night the Sea Dreamed It Was Greta Scacchi’ – ‘it did not’ was the Martin Amis rejoinder – or ‘Bring Me the Sweat of Gabriela Sabatini’ seemed to fall, like his mate Robert Hughes’s ‘Sohoiad’, into the category of brilliant interventions from a world elsewhere, a greater world that could handle the merely literary with its left hand. It was all too easy to imagine that James, for all his manifest brilliance, had fallen, like Lucifer, never to rise again.

Could it be that there is less to Julia Gillard than meets the eye? She is a woman of fierce intelligence, Australia’s best parliamentary performer, and one of the sharpest wits in Canberra. I met Gillard a couple of times early in her political career, when she was shadow minister for immigration, and engaged her in a lengthy discussion about refugee policy. This was not long after the Tampa affair, when Labor was searching for a way back from the wilderness of electoral defeat and the party was bleeding internally from wounds caused by rank-and-file anger at its response to John Howard’s handling of the asylum seekers issue. I found Gillard to be charming, engaging and funny. She was well briefed, open to argument and ideas, but questioning and critical. I had the sense even then that her feet were firmly grounded in the reality of electoral politics: that no policy proposal would pass muster if it might constitute a serious obstacle on the path back to power in Canberra.

Like many Australians, I have followed Gillard’s rise through Labor’s ranks keenly since then, if only because she has added colour and vibrancy to federal politics (I’m not talking about her hair). So I was eager to read Jacqueline Kent’s biography. Sadly, having done so, I find the deputy prime minister rather less interesting than I did before I started.

In the anniversary week of Barack Obama’s election, the New York Yankees won the World Series, as all the world surely knows by now. The victory might have guaranteed a celebration, even in an America where unemployment hit ten per cent in the same week, but the glitz of the Yankees’ Friday ticker-tape parade through Lower Manhattan’s sombre but not sobered financial district was overshadowed by the news of the mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas by American-born Major Nidal Malik Hasan.

By Sunday, when Ari Fleisher, Yankees fan and George W. Bush’s former press secretary, wrote a rueful column about the ironies of victory for a Republican-voting baseball tragic like himself (since Eisenhower, the Yankees have only ever won the World Series under a Democrat president), the joke fell a little flat. Bad timing. Still, the New YorkTimes judged right in carrying the column: it was a salving piece of bi-partisan whimsy in a week marked by violent death, by extreme Republican naysaying in Congress, and calls for revolution from the ‘Tea Party Patriots’ rallying on the steps of Capitol Hill. Their ‘little bit of revolution’ included brandishing poster images of the piled-up dead of Dachau. That’s how some of the patriots chose to characterise Obama’s reform initiative: as ‘National Socialist Healthcare’, somehow akin to the Holocaust. Only the kinder pundits called them crazy.

Maya Linden

Amid the proliferation of fiction inspired by supernatural themes, it is refreshing to find several débuts concerned with the more mundane – yet perhaps more pertinent – quests of adolescence. Tohby Riddle’s The Lucky Ones (Penguin) explores a period of change in the life of Tom, an aspiring artist, as he negotiates the purgatory between high school and adulthood. Told in a conversational voice, punctuated with poetic observation, it is a meditation on ‘the faint sadness that seems to underpin all things wonderful’.