In a mountain area of south-eastern France that I know well, the locals will often respond to a comment on the beauty of the valleys by remarking glumly that they are not what they were: the forest is expanding, they say. We might see reforestation as a good thing, restoring hillsides devegetated and exposed to erosion by goats and sheep, but to them it marks the loss of a beloved familiar landscape. This bears out a point that Peter McPhee makes throughout his engaging new book, An Environmental History of France: that people have an idealised image of French landscapes, perceiving them as beautiful and timeless. In fact, he shows, they are the product of human activity, most markedly over the past 150 years. In that time, the bay around Mont-Saint-Michel has been largely reclaimed for farming, the hedgerows of Normandy have been destroyed, and freeways and fast train lines have sliced through the countryside.

Edwin Frank is the founder and editor of the NYRB Classics series and the editorial director of New York Review Books. He is also the author of Snake Train: Poems 1984-2013 and Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel. He co-edited At the Louvre: Poems by 100 contemporary world poets, reviewed on page 55.

At a time when President Donald Trump seeks to extinguish the legal recognition of trans and gender diverse people, Bonjour, Mademoiselle! and the life of April Ashley feel unexpectedly topical. Ashley, best known in Australia for her role in Corbett v Corbett, a precedent-setting divorce case that set back the legal right of trans people for generations, is the subject of a new biography by Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts.

Each year the Macquarie Dictionary convenes a panel to select a word of the year. In 2019, the panel chose ‘cancel culture’, which it defined as ‘the attitudes within a community which call for or bring about the withdrawal of support from a public figure’. Since then, cancel culture has been a preoccupation of Australian journalists and politicians, with cancellation serving as shorthand for punishment for expressing dissenting views, and sometimes just for being out of favour with a powerful and homogeneous cohort of unnamed leftists.

On 22 January 1840, the Mettray Penal Colony officially opened. Mettray was a French prison farm for juvenile criminals that was imitated by other incarceration programs throughout Europe as a disciplinary model. For Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1975), its creation was a turning point in human power relations, as its structure reconfigured punishment as discipline and surveillance; it transformed society into a carceral culture. As Foucault claims, power and knowledge are one and the same.

Venice is a vast project for an historian. Dennis Romano has written what he calls a ‘remarkable history’, generous in its pursuit over 600 pages, with eighty-five pages of impeccable documentation. It is a revisionary history, not only because Romano goes beyond the end of the Republic in 1797, when Napoleon conquered Venice and planted a Tree of Liberty in St Mark’s Square. The three chapters on Modern and Contemporary Venice bring Romano’s history to the present day.

‘Poetry is a speaking picture,’ said Simonides of Keos, and ‘painting a silent poetry’. From ancient Greece until now, these ‘sister arts’ have been frequently conjoined, though it is most often poetry that speaks to or for painting rather than the reverse. We have come to call this interaction ekphrasis (literally, a ‘speaking out’), usually defined as ‘a verbal description of a work of art’. In Classical times it was a school exercise for developing rhetorical skills, but ever since Homer’s elaborate depiction of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, it has been co-opted by poets, especially during the last century.

The celebrity ghost-written memoir is the non-fiction form de nos jours. Publishers see it as a winner that combines quality narrative with mass-market appeal. Such memoirs do not even need to contain fresh insight when there is an established fanbase. Just ask Prince Harry about the trouble it causes when a revelation does shock. The idea that a pope should put his name to a co-developed text is nevertheless novel. Of Pope Francis’s predecessors, only that preening Renaissance man of letters Pius II Piccolomini contributed to the genre directly. Piccolomini’s Commentaries, though light-hearted Latin, are also a self-indulgent, self-justifying piece of self-invention. The precedent for Francis does not encourage.

Night after night, the protests swirl into one. Slogans blast through the distorted echo of plastic megaphones. Whistles are blown at such a piercing volume that my ears ring when sleep eventually comes, usually around 7 am. Blockades close the city’s main arteries and highways. Police in riot gear are deployed to each of the three main roads that lead in and out of the city. Rustaveli Avenue, the main street in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital and largest city, has once again become the nation’s political fault line.

Early on in Russell McGregor’s new book on the history of birdwatching in Australia, he highlights the importance of the initial epiphany most birdwatchers experience when their interest first sparks. This moment of what Julian Huxley called ‘sudden glory’ can happen anywhere and at any time, city or country, day or night, and often fans out into an obsession, sometimes a profession, that endures through a lifetime.