The End of Ideology and the Rise of Religion by William D. Rubinstein; The Social Affairs Unit, 2009, £10.

Professor William Rubinstein lived in Australia from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. A polymath, he has written on wealth in Australia and Britain, on genocide studies, on Shakespeare and, with his wife Hilary, on the history of the Jews in Australia. His departure was a great loss to Australian intellectual life. Rubinstein’s new publication is a 30,000-word monograph on a number of wide-ranging developments over recent decades. The monograph is subtitled “How Marxism and Other Secular Universalistic Ideologies Have Given Way to Religious Fundamentalism”. In parallel with the fading of Marxism, Rubinstein documents the decline of religion in the West, though he notes some exceptions. While we are secularising, other parts of the world are resacralising, with religion as the driving force, the most dramatic example being the rise of Islamist religious fundamentalism.

The Pope’s Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice della Rovere by Caroline P. Murphy; Faber & Faber, 2006, $26.95.

This  elegant and accessible book knows its limits, never strays beyond its ken, or risks becoming hostage to fortune. It’s about an important but little-known subject. Its use of source material is astute and comprehensive, and where there’s no source material its assumptions are measured, as the author, Caroline Murphy, introduces her readers to historical characters who lived in Italy during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Their world was dominated by the politics of patronage, the imperatives of agrarian and mercantile capitalism, and a focus on the interconnected web of mutual responsibility between rulers and ruled.

Invaders of the Heart by Lee Knowles Interactive Press, 2008, $25.

From the late 1960s Australian poetry became dominated by a group that Mark O’Connor has described as “The Bubble”, and Richard Packer as “The Epigones”. One of their leading lights stated they specifically rejected poetry dealing with: “ethics, morality, religion and mythology”. This, while possibly in some cases simply sour grapes, was good news for ethics, morality, religion and mythology.

Had they gone off to play with their own trivial conceits, little harm might have been done. However, tightly organised mutual promotion was accompanied by an equally intense if generally unspoken campaign to exclude and silence all those not in the group. The reading and book-buying public had its own opinion, and tended to simply turn away from poetry altogether. The good suffered along with the bad.

Poussin’s Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonne by Christopher Wright; Chaucer Press, 2007, $125.

Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions edited by Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen;

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2008, $120.

Christopher Wright’s book is the second and much-updated and revised edition of a work which first appeared in 1985. It is the most widely accessible source book detailing the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, who was born in Normandy in 1594 and died at Rome in 1665. It is an attractive, good and useful book and well worth its cost.

Wright only offers us a thoughtful introduction surveying Poussin’s life and works and recording the disagreements on, and changes that have occurred to, attributions of works by this great artist. He also provides chapters on the artist’s early years in Rome, his early maturity in the 1630s, the mature works including the Sacraments series and related paintings, the landscape paintings and the final years. In addition, there are lists of the securely attributed paintings, lost and newly attributed paintings, an informative chronology of the artist’s life, some choice extracts from Poussin’s letters, and a selection of observations by critics. As well, Wright’s detailed chronology and history of paintings and collections is of great scholarly interest. There is also a list of Poussin’s patrons and the works executed for each of them.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2001–2004 edited by Lawrence Goldman; Oxford University Press, 2009, £95.

When the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was published (in print and online) in September 2004 it produced a wave of superlatives—“the greatest cultural enterprise on earth”, “the greatest reference work on earth”. The libraries of those bibliophiles and scholars who had £1500 to purchase the work made room for sixty volumes in the simple livery of the Oxford University Press—dark blue with gold lettering—running twelve feet along the shelf, weighing 280 pounds, comprising 60,000 pages, 54,922 lives in 60 million words written by 10,000 contributors. Now these libraries will need to make room for another volume. Oxford has published a supplement—a 1268-page volume of 819 eminent Britons who died between 2001 and 2004, from “Roy Acheson, epidemiologist” to “Arnold Ziff, businessman and philanthropist”.

A Better Place to Live by Diana Giese; Freshwater Bay Press, 2009, $22.95.

This little book reminds me of one of those tiny electric torches, no bigger than a walnut; women often carry one attached to their handbag, and men to their key-ring. Small, yes, but they cast a brilliant light into a dark corner. Diana Giese, in plain language and from much personal knowledge, describes the heroic quarter-century of the Northern Territory’s effort to remake itself, following its total ruination during the Second World War.

Darwin’s harbour was clogged by the wrecks of sixty-four ships sunk by Japanese air raids; services such as electricity and water had ceased. Of the buildings not actually wrecked, few had escaped damage. The re-gathering population, old-timers and new-chums alike, often had to squat in some semi-ruin, and share it with the owls, possums and snakes.

Presbyterians in Colonial Victoria by Malcolm Wood; Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008, $44.

On being told that there was a new book on Presbyterian history in Victoria and that I should review it, my feelings were cool. There would be lots of grey-bearded old worthies, claimed as saintly or at least very wise, sandwiched between syrupy clerical jargon.

But no. This is a briskly and clearly written and information-packed piece of social history, with a lot to say about how an important part of Australian society has developed, warts—of which there are many—and all.

The author, a lapsed Presbyterian whose father was the last pre-Uniting Church Moderator-General of Australia, has turned in later years to a critical evaluation of his inheritance. He was also Assistant Director-General of the National Archives, and this background shows in his command of the records.

The Celebrated George Barrington: A Spurious Author, the Book Trade, and Botany Bay by Nathan Garvey; Hordern House Rare Books, 2008, $64.

Several decades ago the distinguished Yale historian Robin Winks published a series of essays under the title, The Historian as Detective. With the publication of Nathan Garvey’s account of the life and disreputable times of “the Celebrated George Barrington”, and the publishing industry that became associated with his name, it’s now the case that readers have available to them a classic example of the bibliographer as detective.