Half-Price Hardback   As the bookshops die in country towns it’s department stores that stock reader shelves   with detective fiction with hetero romance with war and RSL books with cookery and garden   and heaped gifts for children. This is the culture: no history but the Allied, nothing strange. No poetry.   All’s preserved slow TV selling no stapled memoirs, no spirit, no religion, no theory, little foreign   except tourist guides, no languages at all, only ever middlebrow, the culture of habitual.         Les Murray