Political Tourists: Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1940s, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Rasmussen; Melbourne University Press, 2008, $49.95.

The phenomenon of Soviet fellow travellers is well known—true believers from the West who travelled to the Soviet Union between the 1920s and the 1950s, many deliriously wanting to believe it was a burgeoning paradise. They were duchessed into believing their dreams were true. The exhaustive exposé on this topic is Paul Hollander’s book Political Pilgrims.

Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin and Australia, by Tom Frame; UNSW Press, 2009, $39.95.

As HMS Beagle approached Sydney in January 1836, four years out from England, the young Charles Darwin was looking forward to a break in a civilised country. “We all on board,” he wrote, “are looking forward to Sydney, as to a little England: it really will be very interesting to see the colony which must be the Empress of the South.” The reality was disappointing. Sydney in the middle of a drought-stricken summer was not a little England. The servant girls were vile-mouthed. The Aborigines “appear to me to stand some few degrees higher in the scale of civilization than the Fuegians”. There were no kangaroos to see.

What Should I Believe? by Dorothy Rowe; Routledge, 2009, $34.95.

The author of this book was, according to Radio National, voted one of the fifty wisest people in the UK by Saga magazine in 2004 and was recently picked in another British poll as number seventy-two among the top 100 living geniuses in the world (Osama bin Laden came somewhat higher at forty-three).

Frances Partridge: The Biography, by Anne Chisholm; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009, $59.95.

Anne Chisholm has called this book “The biography”. No other has been written, or is likely to be, because Frances Partridge wrote no big books, and she is known mainly for being a friend of a number of people, most of whom were a generation older than herself, who lived in and around Bloomsbury in the years before the Second World War. But she is the author of diaries, which she kept most of her life. She published, during the 1980s and 1990s, edited diaries covering the years 1932 to 1975. I came upon one of these volumes by chance, and soon wanted to read more. Her attitude to her friends was deeply interested and affectionate, and she could describe them and their doings both objectively and sympathetically.

The Personal Correspondence of Hildegard of Bingen, edited by Joseph Baird; Oxford University Press, 2006, $39.95.

During the last few decades, historians have translated primary sources which suggest something happened to the role of women during the Middle Ages, particularly during a period often referred to as the High Middle Ages (1000–1299 AD); a period of rapid population and economic growth, urbanisation, rise of centralised government, and struggle for control between church and state. The relative tolerance of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries gave way to increasing pressure for unity and conformity from all classes. For example, earlier on, some wives went into separate trades from their husbands and, in some towns, were treated as a single woman when involved in trade disputes. How much this independence characterised the role of medieval women generally, and how much that role changed, as the twin cults of Chivalry and the Virgin combined to influence the perception and position of women, are subjects of debate.