The Three Fates is a romance novel by F. Marion Crawford. Crawford was an American author noted for his numerous novels, particularly those set in Italy, and for his classic bizarre and fantastical stories. Excerpt: "She bore in her whole being and presence the stamp of a comfortable life. There is nothing more disturbing to society than the forced companionship of a person who either is, or looks, uncomfortable, in body, mind, or fortune, and many people owe their popularity almost solely to a happy faculty of seeming always at their ease. It is certain that neither birth, wealth, nor talent will of themselves make man or woman popular, not even when all three are united in the possession of one individual. But on the other hand they are not drawbacks to social success, provided they are merely means to the attainment of that unobtrusively careless good humour which the world loves. Mrs. Sherrington Trimm knew this. If not talented, she possessed at all events a pedigree and a fortune; and as for talent, she looked upon culture as an hereditary disease peculiar to Bostonians, and though not contagious, yet full of danger, inasmuch as its presence in a well-organised society must necessarily be productive of discomfort. All the charm of general conversation must be gone, she thought, when a person appeared who was both able and anxious to set everybody right. She even went so far as to say that if everybody were poor, it would be very disagreeable to be rich. She never wished to do what others could not do; she only aimed at being among the first to do what everybody would do by and by, as a matter of course."

Rosemary Dobson received the Patrick White Award in 1994, with the selection committee declaring that her poetry 'abounds in penetrating observation and quiet wisdom; it is blessedly free from sensational effects -- one reason, perhaps, why her work has not attracted the attention it deserves.'Yet it had been noticed. First published in 1984, this collection, The Three Fates and Other Poems, won the Grace Leven Poetry Prize and was joint winner of the C. J. Dennis Prize for Poetry.Rosemary Dobson ( 1920-2012) was an award-winning poet whose works include Cock Crow (1965), winner of the Sidney Myer Award for Australian Poetry, and Untold Lives and Later Poems (2000), winner of the Dinny O'Hearn Poetry Prize. As well as being the recipient of the Patrick White award in 1994, she received a New South Wales Premier's Special Award in 2006.

In Samson Agonistes, Milton’s last great work, he addresses questions that pressed insistently on the imagination of all who were unhappy with the changes wrought by the Restoration. How do we respond to the experience of defeat, and to fears of having been abandoned by the divine? How do we know when our actions accord with divine will, or when they are fueled instead by our fallen desires and weaknesses? At what point do accommodation and compromise with an enemy become a failure of will? What constitutes true heroism? To what extent is violence justified in the cause of freedom? In this dramatic poem, Milton abandons the regularly maintained blank verse of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and employs varying line lengths, mixes blank verse with lyric rhyme, and takes such liberties with scansion that the poem often has the feel of modern “free verse.” To many scholars, the poetry of Samson Agonistes seems the culminating literary expression of a poet who had already demonstrated his mastery of traditional forms and felt free to abandon convention to create the poetic effects he desired. In addition to Samson Agonistes, this volume includes a selection of Milton’s best-known short poems (also taken from The Broadview Anthology of British Literature). The biblical material concerning Samson is also included in an appendix.

This collection of essays pays tribute to acclaimed Australian poet Rosemary Dobson, whose papers are held in the National Library of Australia. The book features essays by Elizabeth Lawson, Paul Hetherington and David McCooey. A selection of Dobson's poems highlight her diversity and artistry.