THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"Manning Clark wrote for the public gallery, and his prose is ever conscious of its presence, even to the point of inserting the applause, guffaws and shouts of abuse from an imagined public chorus into his narrative. And to keep his audience entertained, it was sometimes necessary to be flexible with the facts. Clark's eye was first and foremost on the dramatic impact of the narrative."

In "Being There", Mark McKenna delves into the strange history of Manning Clark, Australia's best-known historian, finding a man who considered himself an outsider and an artist. McKenna's extensive archival research reveals that Clark's passion for mythologising his own life resulted in a personal history that drew heavily on the lives of others: in relating accounts of his life-defining experiences, such as why he became a historian, Clark absorbed the experiences of his wife, Dymphna, and the Russian novelist Dostoevsky.

"Of all Clark's epiphanies, there is one that stands out for its allegorical power. It is the one that he told most often, the one he invested with the most significance, especially because it explains the genesis of his life as a historian ... ‘The History of Manning Clark', led with the story, describing the 23-year-old Clark arriving at Bonn on the morning after Kristallnacht, on 10 November 1938."

In the most prominent example, Clark's account of experiencing the aftermath of Kristallnacht - when the Nazis burned synagogues and attacked Jewish shops - is shown to be drawn from Dymphna Clark's description in letters she wrote to him before his arrival in Germany. Manning Clark recounted the Kristallnacht tale through his last years, explaining that the event shaped his life. Rather than passing judgement on Clark, though - whose focus was, after all, always on remembering feeling, not detail - McKenna argues it was Clark's passion for stories which showed the essential truth of humanity that led him to meld others' histories with his own.

"Just over five years ago, John Howard called Afghanistan the ‘front-line in the fight against terrorism', and Australia became one of the first countries to join the US and the Northern Alliance in the battle against the Taliban. But more than 4000 people were killed there in 2006, the most violent year since 2001 ... [and] the Taliban is warning that spring will be the bloodiest fighting season yet, claiming that it has 2000 suicide bombers trained and ready to join the new offensive."

In "Winter in Afghanistan", Debbie Whitmont travels to the province of Kunar, in eastern Afghanistan, the region known to the US military as "enemy central". She talks with senior US commanders and Afghan officials who are trying to get the country on track, and to locals who are simply trying to survive in the face of powerful elements of Afghan society which are profiting from things remaining just as they are.

"As we fly back up the Pech Valley, following the new road built with American money, the sun is going down. General Eikenberry tells me how much he will miss Afghanistan ... and that his fear is that the international community will abandon Afghanistan yet again. He also admits that there are some things that foreigners will probably never fix. ‘The problems of corruption, bad governance, bribery: the Afghan leadership must take on those themselves,' he says. ‘A corrupt police chief can be a bigger enemy to all of us here than a terrorist.'"

THE NATION REVIEWED

"When he turned 65, Howard promised to stay in the job for as long as the Liberal Party and the voters wanted him. And he reiterated the promise when Costello challenged last year. There is a deep disingenuousness in this promise. Taken at face value - and this is how Howard wants it taken - it disavows personal ambition and puts him at the service of the party and the nation. But it also says: If you want me to leave, you will have to throw me out."

In the Monthly Comment, Judy Brett examines the three turning points that could alter Australian politics this year, sweeping John Howard's Coalition government from office. She argues that these shifts in voters' attitudes towards politics - from age to youth, from fear to hope and from public to private - will be critical to the result of the 2007 election.

"Howard has embraced the war in Iraq with such enthusiasm because war suits his leadership style, and he focuses on enemies real and imagined, because he needs them. Real terrorists are a boon, but his obsessive battle with a largely imaginary left-wing educational establishment shows that there is more going on here than a hard-nosed confrontation with a nasty reality. It is a timeworn cliché, but if he didn't have enemies, he would need to invent them."

"Every smart remark has to be made for the first time, but we should be suspicious when a famous person gets the credit, unless the famous person is also a famous wit. An obvious example is Marilyn Monroe's reply to the set-up question about what she wore in bed. ‘Chanel No. 5,' she is reputed to have said, but even at the time, there was a widespread assumption that a publicity man had both prompted the question and supplied the answer."

In "Saying Famous Things", Clive James argues that if a well-known quote sounds clever, the odds are that the well-known person to whom it is attributed - whether Liberace or Noël Coward, Göring or Lyndon Johnson - is not the person who first said it.

"A smart saying is usually as anonymous as a suckerfish in search of a shark. When it finds one, it begins its long ride in a tunnel of reflected glory, while the source of the glory gets the credit for powers of invention equal to its prominence."

Plus, Ashley Hay visits an unusual social experiment, the Human Zoo in Adelaide; and Edward Scheer discovers the CarriageWorks arts precinct in Sydney, which stands on the site of the former Eveleigh Railway Workshops.

ARTS & LETTERS

"The Fairfax Experience is only marginally about the media. Its subject is management: in particular, the way management reduces everything in its path to inputs, outputs, processes and PowerPoint presentations, oblivious to its own vanity and delusions. No Taylorist ever described the work of a foundry with the same incomprehension as Hilmer in delineating the exercise of news gathering."

In "Read All About It", Gideon Haigh is flabbergasted by Fred Hilmer's The Fairfax Experience and its total ignorance of journalistic culture. Haigh demonstrates that Hilmer's attempts to make square pegs fit into round holes - reducing journalists' and subeditors' access to articles, guiding all editorial decisions by research, subscribing to management gurus' modish attempts to re-jig organisations - were first undertaken and have since been repeated in some of the world's most prestigious newspapers.

"Research is newspapers' God That Failed. They have been probing and prodding and polling their readers for generations, even as they have watched their circulation dwindle due to secular forces over which they are mostly powerless: somewhere, there are probably mountains of market research undertaken by buggy-whip manufacturers in the early days of the horseless carriage, too."

"Instead of finding pre-show adrenaline at stall B69, however, I stumbled upon a huddle of three women ... Gloom pervaded the mezzanine. Gallery staff and friends shifted about the stall in a silent Brownian motion. At least one of the artists looked as though she'd been crying. Some people stared balefully at me; others rolled their eyes; yet others ignored me. It was one of those things: you can't ask what's going on without irritating everyone, but you can't not ask without dying of curiosity."

In "A Law That Cannot Be Enforced", Justin Clemens relates a little-known story of art and politics colliding at the 2006 Melbourne Art Fair. Why was part of an installation removed at the last minute, and why did the artists and gallery co-ordinators involved not know that the offending work breached accepted cultural protocols?

"Wherever you look, politics and art just can't keep their hands off each other. If it's not the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas or the former US attorney-general John Ashcroft covering up the Spirit of Justice statue because he objected to her bare breast, it's a gaggle of protestors raging against Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987), a photograph of a crucifix swimming in the artist's urine. In each of these notorious incidents, art falls prey to a monotheistic zealousness which seeks to cover up or obliterate the object of its rage."

There's also Robert Forster on the new albums from two rising American indie bands, The Shins and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah; and Adrian Martin on South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's excellent new multi-genre film, The Host, with its captivating star, Bae Doo-na.