Each year Barry Jones, certainly one of Australia’s great thinkers, sends his friends a list of the books that have inspired him during the year. We thought it such a fabulous list that we asked Barry if we could share this with you and he kindly said yes. One of the books he omitted from the list is a new, much expanded, and completely revised edition of The Penalty is Death (Scribe) edited by Barry himself and published to mark the centenary of the abolition of capital punishment in Queensland. Barry first published this collection in 1968 and in addition to the original content there's now remarkable contributions by Michael Kirby, Julian McMahon, Richard Bourke and Mike Richards. In his new introduction he cogently argues that the death penalty, while abolished in Australia, is widely enforced in many countries and that we still need to be vigilant in advocating against it. I hope you find something of interest here. – Mark Rubbo

We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland since 1958 by Fintan O’Toole

A dazzling social history of modern Ireland, and its rapid transition to a more secular state, that is hysterically funny and deeply appalling, often simultaneously. O’Toole writes about corruption, misogyny, miracles, sexual abuse in the church, contraception, property development, serial lying in politics and more.

The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron by Benjamin Ehrlich

A marvellous account of Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s work in Spain, his meticulous drawings of neural networks and the rivalry with his fellow Nobel laureate Camillo Golgi.

Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald by Carole Angier

W.G. (aka Max) Sebald was born in Germany, son of a Nazi, but lived and worked in England, while retaining German nationality and publishing only in German.

His four ‘prose works with pictures’ combine elements of novels, essays, biographies, natural histories, travel guides, and include photographs. He died just after gaining international recognition, with a Nobel Prize on the horizon. Angier tries find out the truth about Sebald. Who was he? Who are we, if it comes to that? What is the truth of any matter?

Dreamers and Schemers. A Political History of Australia by Frank Bongiorno

Splendidly written, insightful and comprehensive, this would make an ideal Christmas present. Bongiorno is a great scholar and superb communicator.

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by Alex Ross

Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, has an extraordinary range of expertise and is an intensely stimulating writer. He writes of Wagner and Wagnerism in the context of politics, philosophy, ‘the survival of the fittest’, art, architecture and literature. His cast includes Nietzsche, Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Proust, Joyce, Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Tolkien, Hitler, Mahler, Stravinsky, Buñuel and Dali.

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow

This is a revisionist account of how civilization developed, challenging the prevailing view of how simple hunter-gatherers were part of linear progression towards centrally organised production. Graeber and Wengrow argue that human life before the Agricultural Revolution was far more complex, sophisticated and varied than the conventional wisdom recognises.