AustLit

'As one of Anthony Powell’s characters put it, books do furnish a room. It made a great title for a novel. But there comes a point where books not only furnish a room, they take it over completely. Like all addictions, book collecting has its unavoidable consequences. You may not waste away like Thomas De Quincey’s Opium Eater or pickle your liver like Jack London’s John Barleycorn, but you do have to come to terms with storage problems, and I was running out of space. Indeed I had been out of space for years. And once books reach a critical mass, they can kill, at least according to the literary record. Remember poor Leonard Bast in E. M. Forster’s Howards End, crushed to death beneath a falling bookcase: a warning to lower-class youth of the dangers of aspiring to high culture.'  (Introduction)

'I have been brooding on the reports of the death of literary fiction. How can novels become newsworthy again? How can they get up there with the glitz, glamour and drama essential for our contemporary celebrity culture? Literary awards rate an occasional bit of coverage but, a few notable exceptions apart, generally lack the necessary scandal to achieve massive publicity.' (Introduction)

Wilding reads the letters exchanged between Stead and Blake and concludes that they are 'important in redressing the misleading account of Christina perpetrated in the unsatisfactory biography of Stead by Hazel Rowley' (25).

'I have never been one to refuse a literary lunch. ‘A man’s got to eat,’ as Brian Kiernan puts it. Though when I was publishing Brian’s Studies in Australian Literary History he did complain that I was the most interventionist editor he had ever known, less for my editorial suggestions, of which there were few, but for my habit of calling him up and suggesting lunch. Not that he ever seemed to refuse lunch in my recollection, but it did delay the book a bit. Many a meal we have shared with visiting celebrities and literary editors fast approaching their use-by date. The wit, the repartee, the exchange of insights and the capping of each other’s quotations, the progressively heated discussions leading to confrontation, misunderstanding, and recrimination.' (Introduction)

'Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life was the first great Australian novel. To my mind, it still remains the greatest. Its account of the horrors and brutalities of the convict settlement of Australia is unforgettable. I am not sure that I can bring myself to read it again, I think I would find it too painful an experience. I feel like that about King Lear and Wuthering Heights and much of Dostoevsky and D. H. Lawrence. These are the books to read in adolescence when you can gain a pleasure from tragedy and empathize with suffering.' (Introduction)

'I once heard an extraordinary publishing story. A young academic who had written his first book was apologizing to his old professor for the fact that the publisher had refused to allow the names of critics to be included in the index. Consequently the professor would not find his name listed. Perhaps it was a publisher’s way of saving money by keeping down indexing costs, but it was surely a short-sighted decision.' (Introduction)

'John Milton has always been a contentious figure. A high-profile republican, he was lucky not to be executed after the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660. Posters appeared advertising God’s vengeance on former revolutionaries, and Milton’s blindness was cited as evidence that God had already punished him. His books were publicly burned and he spent time in gaol, but was released on the intervention of Sir William Davenant, the nose-less poet (he had syphilis) who in his cups claimed to be the natural son of Shakespeare.'  (Introduction)

'I entered the refurbished shopping mall to find that the newsagent was no longer there. I found one still surviving in the next suburb, bought the weekly I was looking for, only to find that this was the last print issue. In future it would be available only online.' (Introduction)

'The closure of The Bulletin magazine on Australia Day 2008 after 128 years of publication came as no surprise. The surprise was that it had lasted for so long. As Peter Coleman, a former editor, remarked in The Australian, ‘The old Bulletin died decades ago’.' (Introduction)

'The media flurry about ‘fake news’ and the era of ‘post-truth’ in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential election was surely somewhat disingenuous. When was the news ever free from faking or bias or manipulation of the truth? Until the Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century it had been prohibited to publish domestic news in Britain. With the breakdown of authority in the confrontation of king and parliament, both sides issued newspapers. Mercurius Aulicus gave the Royalist news, Mercurius Britannicus gave the Parliamentary version. The origins of the English- language newspaper were in partisan politics, not in any concern for the truth. And it has surely stayed that way.'  (Introduction)

'Years ago Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote an essay called ‘Where do Poems Come From?’ I can’t remember whether he answered the question. Certainly the origins of literary creation still remain mysterious: the muse, the subconscious, inspiration, hard work, calculated marketing, a publisher’s commission, a tentative suggestion, a pressing request. Sometimes you find yourself taken down a track you never intended. Sometimes a number of factors combine to point you in a certain direction. Wild Bleak Bohemia developed from a number of different sources, and in the process evolved its own shape.' (Introduction)

'I knew I was in trouble when my publisher refused to let me call a novel The Literary Pages. ‘The word literature on the cover of a book is the kiss of death,’ he said.' 

(Introduction)

'Crime fiction is a label that covers a huge variety of literary production. Those of us who read so much of it usually have distinct preferences. I’m not so keen on those books, or television series, that get deeply into post- mortem dissections and dismemberments. I don’t like novels of serial killers or child abuse. I prefer private-eyes to police procedure, though I enjoy Colin Dexter’s Morse and Peter Robinson’s Banks and Ann Cleeves’ Vera and Garry Disher’s Challis and Destry series. And Arthur Upfield’s Bony series, even if they are now deemed to be politically incorrect. But I can also enjoy cosy country-house mysteries. And espionage and conspiracy I lap up. In fact, I can read most of it.' (Introduction)

'Detective fiction is a genre that takes a huge range of different styles and approaches. With Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton gave detective fiction an unforgettable character and a persuasive rationale for his skills. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes presented a cerebral, analytical, intuitive intellectual, humanized by association with his friend Dr Watson. With Father Brown Chesterton offered not a thinking machine with an arcane knowledge of poisons, tobacco ash and other bizarre items that can be decoded as clues, but a mild-mannered priest whose knowledge of crime had been acquired in the course of his daily work. As Father Brown says to the arch villain Flambeau in ‘The Blue Cross’, ‘Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men’s real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?’' (Introduction)

'When I was an undergraduate my tutor used to look through the lecture list to see what was worth attending. ‘Oh, no, he’s no good. Oh, no, you wouldn’t get much out of that. No, I don’t think you’d want to waste time there,’ he would say, adding, ‘I think you’d best just go along to the library.’' (Introduction)

'Over the last decade university libraries have been systematically removing books from their shelves. Various reasons have been given. The University of Western Sydney dumped consignments of them as landfill, claiming they were surplus to requirements or infested with silverfish. Other libraries sold off or gave away allegedly duplicate copies on trestle tables at their entrance. The University of Sydney library removed half a million copies claiming that it had run out of shelf space and that electronic journals and digital books meant hard copies were no longer needed. Anything not borrowed in the previous five years was consigned to an off-campus deposit library.' (Introduction)

'The panopticon was Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century proposal for a prison, architecturally devised so that one warder could from a single position look into every cell. Of course, the warder would not be looking into every cell simultaneously, or into any cell all of the time. But there was no way that the individual prisoner could know whether the warder was watching or not. It was a control mechanism that instilled a climate of fear.' (Introduction)

'Advertising is so much a part of our daily lives now that we rarely think about it. Except to press mute on the television remote control when advertisements appear. But that is just a matter of shutting them out, not of analysing them. We used to be more analytical. I remember my schoolteachers pointing out how advertising slogans could be manipulative and of questionable honesty. A fellow student of mine at college told me how he had spent thirty minutes gazing at shelves of toothpaste, in order to work out – and resist – those that were using subliminal slogans and devices to persuade him to buy them.' (Introduction)