The news of Carmen Callil’s death last week shocked the literary world even though it was expected. She made an immense impact first with feminist publisher Virago and her rediscovery of a world of classic modern writing by women and then at the highest levels of general publishing. It was true with her, as they said of St Thomas Aquinas, that no word was impossible. She would argue about anything with bright intensity but without resentment. The woman they called ‘The Calm’ had such eminence in publishing because she cherished her writers. There was an impassioned moral loyalty, an enduring warmth that outstared her fierceness and her feuds. It was inspiriting to get an email from her telling you that no, you were wrong about the model for the figure in Julian Barnes’ Elizabeth Finch: it was not Penelope Fitzgerald, but Anita Brookner perhaps with a touch of someone else. Carmen Callil seems to have spent her life saying what she thought and felt and there was an empire strikes back aspect to her forthrightness in the face of all that English slithering around and evasive understatement. It was typical of her that love of France should have impelled her to write about the horrors of French collaborationism and she retained for all her distinction a very Australian sense of the fair go as well as an ability to admit faults which the nuns of Star of the Sea, Gardenvale, the same school as Germaine Greer, would have said was a Catholic inheritance.

Carmen Callil was an operator and, as Vincent Buckley said once, Melbourne might not have produced the finest Australian writers but it produced superb operators. Were Clem Christesen, who founded Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith, who forged that further left journal Overland, operators? They were certainly editors of distinction. One of the points Jim Davidson makes in his new book about them Emperors in Lilliput –and he speaks as the second editor of Meanjin who had virtually to sleep in the place to wrest control of it from Christesen– is that the literary magazine which can seem marginal to a culture can in fact wear a lot better than yesterday’s newspapers.

Whether that’s true or not you can certainly make a case for it. Jim Davidson was interviewed at Readings, Mark Rubbo’s legendary Carlton bookshop, by another Meanjin editor – in this case a departing one – Jonathan Green who has had a fuller chance to look at the world of commentary in the daily press and in a quarterly than anyone.

At the moment it’s hard to forget Australian Book Review under Peter Rose’s editorship which is not only a monthly journal of literary record but constantly runs arts reviews online. Who would not want to read Michael Shmith reviewing Melbourne Opera’s concert performance of Wagner’s Siegfried with Warwick Fyfe as the Wanderer (ie. Wotan) or the autumnal splendours of the great Zubin Mehta conducting Richard Strauss? The ABR arts reviews are as good or better than anything in the country and then there are the reviews from the treasure house of the past which Rose’s lieutenant Amy Baillieu also puts online which are a salient and compelling reminder of the history we too easily forget.

When Angela Lansbury – like Callil another Dame and in some ways an equally improbable one – died it was odd to think how long she had been part of the Hollywood firmament. So long indeed that the woman who was the aunt of Malcolm Turnbull had made that film of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll that dated back to the days when we didn’t even – Peter Finch aside – have Australian actors playing leading roles in films set here even when they derived from famous Australian plays as The Doll did. Lansbury, though, was a magnificent trouper and anyone who saw her do Driving Miss Daisy with the great James Earl Jones on the Australian stage will be grateful for the experience. She did Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, she was a marvellous Marplesque sleuth and she played Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit in her tenth decade. The girl from the forties Picture of Dorian Gray was arguably at her most remarkable in Frankenheimer’s 1962 masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate. She was only slightly younger than Laurence Harvey but she gave her maternal mantle a tremendously sinister quality. It’s one of the greatest pieces of character acting in the history of cinema.

Is that what Robbie Coltrane was, a character actor? He’s most familiar to a world of millennials and xers for his Hagrid in the Harry Potter films but Coltrane, also dead last week, was a prince among actors. Ken Branagh used him in the cameo of Falstaff he incorporates in his film of Henry V and it’s a pity he didn’t play Falstaff in a full version of Shakespeare’s greatest experiment with naturalism, the two parts of Henry IV.

Fortunately he did Cracker which is one of the mountains of British television. Coltrane plays an utterly dreadful criminal psychologist – a drunk, a gambler, a wreck who happens to be not only supremely insightful but has a flawless capacity to turn the key that gives entrance to other people’s souls.

Coltrane was a quicksilver comedian who understood that a comic’s timing is the supreme actor’s dance of the intellect but he used it in Cracker to sound the depths of the depravities and betrayals the human heart was capable of. It was a physician, heal thyself situation. But it’s one of the greatest representations of psychological understanding in a thriller format, comparable in its way to Porfiry, Dostoveysky’s detective in Crime and Punishment.

The other person who has just died is the poet and superb art critic Peter Schjeldahl. He was open to every aspect of modern art including the greater Warhols but he brought to the articulation of criticism a dazzling eloquence and dexterity. His criticism did not summon up the full panorama of life in the way Robert Hughes’ did but when he was in the presence of something like Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection or indeed a Warhol image of the mourning Jackie Kennedy he seemed to look into his soul and give the art back to his reader with absolute grace and lucidity.