THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"When I looked around last year on my way out the door, long-form journalism had lost more of its reach ... During the year I had made a call to a print journalist, passing on a tip that I thought was a certain front-page story. A harried voice at the other end of the line asked, ‘Can you prove it?' Reporters in well-resourced newspapers would normally be eager for a good lead and appreciate the need to do the proving themselves. But this reporter was trapped by two-hour turnarounds: there was no time to hunt and chase."

In "Hidden Treasure", Chris Masters reflects on nearly 43 years at the ABC. One of the country's most respected investigative journalists, Masters began with a series of regional ABC postings and later produced countless groundbreaking reports during his time with Four Corners; he even had a brief dalliance with commercial television. On his retirement from the ABC, he encapsulates this rich experience in a series of telling vignettes that illustrate the changes that have taken place during his long career - in journalism and, in particular, at the national broadcaster.

"Australia's underbelly, despite the inclination to glamorise it, is banal. I have known Australians to risk all for a cold beer and a root in a brothel ... In those days you did not have to be a crook to know the value of a crooked cop. I was aware of reporters dropping speeding tickets off at Parliament House, for someone in the know to get them cancelled.""After the war, several witnesses testified that in early November 1944 a young man was beaten to death at the barracks. Peter Balazs, a young Jewish man, had been drafted for forced-labour service in April 1944, but did not show up at the appointed place and time. Instead, he lived in Budapest using false (Christian) identity papers. On 8 November 1944 he left home and disappeared. Peter's father, Dezso, subsequently spoke to one of the witnesses who claimed that a young man had been killed by the army at around this time ... In April 1948 Dezso Balazs officially accused Karoly Zentai of involvement in his son's murder."

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In "Murder on Arena Avenue", Hungarian journalist György Vámos sifts through long-untouched archives in Budapest to uncover information about the alleged war criminal Karoly (Charles) Zentai and his suspected role in the death of Peter Balazs, in 1944. Without judgement, without hyperbole, Vámos presents the detailed and disturbing documentation he found on Zentai, who lives in Perth and is trying to avoid extradition.

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"In its daily compendium of schadenfreude and spleen, ‘Cut & Paste', the Australian for its part attempted to discredit Kevin Rudd through the company he kept. Rudd was a critic of neo-liberalism. So were Noam Chomsky and Hugo Chavez. What more needed to be said? Neo-liberals have become accustomed to dominating public debate in Australia. It was not surprising that the appearance of Rudd's challenge was viewed as impertinent and as an affront."

And in "Neo-liberal Meltdown", Robert Manne provides a concise analysis of the global financial crisis, the prime minister's essay on the crisis, and political commentators' response to the essay. Manne argues that the response not only parochial, myopic and "remarkably ill-tempered" but displayed wilful misunderstanding and, most worryingly, an irrational refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of Australia's current economic situation.

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Plus, in "Those Peculiar People", Clare Press delves into the wonderfully weird history of eccentricity, introducing an array of oddballs past and present, and showing that eccentricity is no outmoded preserve of the English upper class - rather, it is an ever-present source of amusement and inspiration for the less adventurous among us, a glorious disruption of conformity by the artistic and the downright strange.

"Luisa Casati was an Italian socialite who haunted the streets of Venice and Paris in the 1920s and '30s naked but for a fur coat, and in the company of two pet cheetahs on diamond leashes. Grace Jones would have adored her. Casati, who favoured kabuki-white makeup and was photographed by Man Ray and dressed by Erté, once arrived at a shindig wearing a battery-powered suit of electric arrows that short-circuited and nearly fried her alive."

THE NATION REVIEWED

"On Thursday, 5 February, Claire Yeo, the Bureau of Meteorology's ‘severe-weather expert', spoke on ABC Radio of the imminent threat. She'd obviously read the forecast in a way we couldn't. There was fear and awe in her voice, yet the language at her disposal had been cruelled into cliché. How extreme could Extreme be? She had no way of categorising, of quantifying, of communicating the risk. Instead of listeners being left under no illusion that there was going to be the flaming equivalent of a Category Five twister, we took home the message that Saturday was going to be hot, bloody hot. Too hot for the beach.

In the Monthly Comment, John van Tiggelen considers the implications of the Victorian bushfires for the rating of fire danger. He argues that the Forest Fire Danger Index, devised some decades ago, must be revised; so too, the long-standing stay-or-leave-early policy.

"Even the most deadbeat climate sceptics must recognise that the bush is going to burn more often and more fiercely. At the same time, controlled burns are going to get trickier ... The already narrow windows for safe burn-offs have been closing steadily. Just as there are storms and there are cyclones, there are fires and there are firestorms. Black Saturday II is the new Extreme. The old Extreme, the 50-point trigger for a Total Fire Ban, was never more than a starting point ..."

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"As we climbed the road to Kinglake, the landscape appeared not so much incinerated - as might be expected - as irradiated. As though some death ray had passed through at incomprehensible speed, blobs and runs of aluminium knuckled the bitumen of the road leading into the town that was being described in the media as having vanished in the firestorm. And yet not everything was dead. Fifty metres down the road from the burnt-out wreck of a dual cab was a green, living tree. Three white goats pocked a black paddock."

In "The Road to Kinglake", Richard Flanagan offers a delicate tribute to the survivors of the recent fires. Visiting the ravaged town of Kinglake, he discovers that residents have retained not only the strength to endure but a remarkable sense of community amid the devastation.

"All around us were people frying onions and hamburgers and sorting clothes, people ash-smeared and fire-exhausted, people still to grieve and people unable to be grateful, people reaching out to each other, people looking out for one another and discovering the extraordinary in themselves ... Beyond us the police teams were turning over tin, turning up more and more dead, yet everywhere I looked I saw only the living helping the living, people holding people, people giving to people."

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There's also Mark Aarons, in "Hideout", on Australia's hidden history of harbouring suspected war criminals; and Craig Sherborne, in "Sinking Sandbanks", on the overcrowded islands of one of Australia's neglected neighbours, Kiribati.

ARTS & LETTERS

"It wasn't any fault of Alistair Cooke's that most of his audience outgrew his product, while those who didn't outgrow it simply grew old. He was around for so long that his work sounded less like something with a history and more like history itself. This is what happens to the last man standing. On American National Public Radio, Garrison Keillor is still doing his cosy little fireside chats, but he is being ironic. Cooke was for real."

In "Last Man Standing", Alan Saunders returns to the heyday of radio with Reporting America, a new collection of the broadcasts and writings of Alistair Cooke. Cooke's measured, reflective style of journalism was epitomised by his wide-ranging and erudite weekly Letter from America, which ran from 1946 until just weeks before the presenter's death, in 2004 - by which time, as Saunders argues, it had become a charming anachronism in an age of talkback radio and instant everything.

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"Of all our Cassandras, Paul Krugman would have been the least surprised by the shape the crisis took, having warned of the capriciousness and dangerousness of financial crises for a decade or more. His book is a model of his pathological clear-headedness and simple, compelling style. Using the simplest explanations and examples, like a set piece about the Washington babysitting co-op that issued its own coupons - a brilliant allegory of the challenges of monetary policy - Krugman entertains and informs lay readers and experts alike."

In "For a Few Dollars More", Nicholas Gruen evaluates four recent books on the global financial crisis, publications that form part of "the crisis-book market". While finding valuable assessments in these uneven, American-focused works, Gruen warns that we would be unwise to follow advice from overseas without tailoring it to the Australian economy.

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"What began there with the raw experience of brash, vigorous masculinity has brought Philip Roth, all these years later, to his recent, scarifying novels about old men. After the grim brilliance of those works, a good few critics and interviewers have been bewildered by Roth's leap back to the furtive sexuality of 1950s campus life. Indignation is a long way from Exit Ghost (2007), the novel that finishes Zuckerman off - his penis reduced to a ‘spigot of wrinkled flesh', leaving him with little but imagination, sitting up at night doing it on the page."

And in "Arise!", Drusilla Modjeska peels away the layers of identity and experience in Philip Roth's latest novel, Indignation, in the light of Roth's sterling recent run of fiction; his breakthrough work, Portnoy's Complaint; and, in particular, his "novelist's autobiography", The Facts.

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Plus, in "Vanity Fare", Gideon Haigh wonders why The Man Who Owns the News, ostensibly about Rupert Murdoch, says more about Michael Wolff, its author; in "Tales of the City", Luke Davies goes to San Francisco of the '70s with Gus Van Sant's Milk, a biopic about the gay-rights activist Harvey Milk; and in "Strangers in the Night", Robert Forster contemplates the vastly different live performances of two legends of the scene, Leonard Cohen and Roberta Flack.

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There's also Tim Rogers on Don Walker's uncommon memoir of rock 'n' roll, country boyhood and physics, Shots; Chris Middendorp on Teenagers, Alcohol and Drugs, a new no-nonsense, nuts-and-bolts guide; and Shane Maloney on the spell cast by the Witch of Kings Cross on the esteemed English conductor and composer Eugene Goossens.