In The Best Australian Essays 2013, Robert Manne draws out this year’s most distinctive voices. This superb collection encompasses the personal, with Robert Dessaix’s distant summer of love and touch-typing and Helen Garner’s reaction to the death of Jill Meagher; and the political, with Chloe Hooper and Pamela Williams reflecting on the last days in office of Gillard and Rudd, while Christos Tsiolkas tells us why we hate asylum seekers and Julian Assange warns of the internet’s threat to civilisation. In the spaces between, Richard Flanagan and Murray Bail peer into the world of art, David Free savours the legacy of Monty Python, Julian Meyrick remembers Margaret Thatcher, and Tim Flannery reveals the terrors of jellyfish.