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Within this handful of proper nouns, so much pathos, humour, mystery and pain. I saw maps unfold across the globe and traditions receding so far into the past they were barely decipherable. What to one culture may seem dizzyingly complicated is, to another, ordinary. Names may contain history’s greatest upheavals in all their pitilessness and terror, as well as one person’s whimsy, or life-saving choice.

What was always apparent at the outset, however, was her passion for what she did and for who she was. Dot was never, nor ever would be, a wallflower or a shrinking violet – instead she approached life with a kind of bravado and swagger that I could only envy. She knew she was a peculiar talent and she did everything she could to realise her potential.

We know nothing whatever about how Macbeth was first performed. Not a shred of evidence survives. It is one of the great Shakespearean mysteries. But consider the following. Macbeth was Shakespeare’s first and only Scottish play, filled with material guaranteed to interest his new Scottish king, from witchcraft to regicide to James’s descent from Banquo.

Within four generations, I found myself at this other end of the spectrum: from the world of my great-grandfather where a man’s duty is to transmit tradition, protecting it from the subversive effect of time, to one where tradition disappears completely and the only plausible raison-d’être of living is change that often sees itself as progressive per se.

Last year I found myself at Lingnan University in Hong Kong to speak at a conference on action cinema. What better place to reflect on the work of cinematic editing in all its forms, from the blazing guns and flying fists of blockbuster movies to the stridently flickering visual assaults of the avant-garde?

All human beings, Hazlitt argued, have the capacity to both reason and imagine, and these abilities should not be regarded as separate. Nor should one be favoured over the other. They are complementary; the passions must bow to the moderating influence of reason, just as reason must not overlook the truth that is revealed by the passions.

Later, at a reception given by the Goethe Institute I was finally introduced to Sebald and was somewhat taken aback by the warmth, the quiet laughter behind the spectacles, the ingenuous manner. ‘Call me Max,’ he suggested, when I struggled with his initials, and I believe that was when I gathered the courage to make a small medical diagnosis of the narrator in The Rings of Saturn, whom I recognised immediately as one suffering from a slipped spinal disc...

Bushfire Journals

These extracts from artist John Wolseley’s journals and sketchbooks describe the five months which he spent drawing and painting in the Royal National Park in the aftermath of the Christmas 2001 bushfires.

With so many characters and storylines and 1,085 pages that put Gravity’s Rainbow (a mere 760 pages) to shame, where to begin? Why, with the mathematicians, of course...

Through photography and prose, Conrad Del Villar traces the significance of the tattoo in the Northern Philippines.

If you’ve ever gone wandering through the nooks and crannies of a large city, loitering with intent and with all the time in the world, attending to unlikely beauties and the aspects of the marvellous that are hidden in full sight right there in the ordinary – then please read on.

Would you knowingly invite a reticent person to dinner, someone like my Oxford supervisor, or my friend who believed in sealing her lips? If you had no choice, how would you deal with such people? Sit them next to Chatty Carl or Commandeering Cathy in hope that their quiet attentiveness would mop up the attention-seeking of the other. The voluble need vessels, after all, into which to pour their words.

In 1958 when I was eight years old my parents took me to New York. I fell in love with its powers of abstraction. It became the city of my mind. In 1988 we took our son to New York. He was eight, and the same thing happened. Now, the door to his room is covered with a large map of midtown Manhattan in detailed axonometric projection. He reads books about places and technologies and is thinking of becoming an architect.

Running in a sequence of dismembered sections, the Roman aqueduct of Nîmes can be read as a kind of fragmented text. Its choked tunnels, collapsed archways, brief truncated arcades can be seen as the scattered passages, say, of some early ontological discourse.

Many persons are fluent in more than one language, but my setting out some years ago at the age of fifty-six to teach myself Hungarian provokes comments and questions from those who get to hear of it.

Alive in ‘Ant and Bee’

I am in the process of buying a thirty-year-old ambulance in 2004, sight unseen, and in the opinion of most people, I’ve gone crazy. Listening to Mr Bible from Homebush Motors in Sydney make his sales pitch on the phone, I think they might have a point.

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