Category: Books and Reviews

Ian McEwan’s new novel, his 18th in a long career of writing books that play with startling premises, bold ideas and big dilemmas, begins as a work of futurist fiction set in 2119. (more…)

Bob Brown’s latest book, Defiance, is a salubrious breath of a tall peppermint native forest. It’s not a hard book, but rather only hard to heed for some. (more…)

“She was my shelter and my storm.” With these words in the opening pages of her memoir, Arundhati Roy unfurls a narrative of extraordinary filial bonds that renders trite those therapeutic memoirs of family dysfunction scattered across the publishing world. (more…)

Today, modernist literary icon Gertrude Stein is famous for many reasons. (more…)

Brigadier O’Brien’s Long Tan is the most important account of our iconic battle in 40 years. The book spins 23 short chapters around a short exclamatory order. (more…)

AUKUS is a classic case of the “tail wagging the dog”. On the back of lies, a constructed inevitability of future conflict and political ambition, Andrew Fowler shows how the Morrison Government might have put the future of Australia’s national security at risk. (more…)

Professor Kerry Brown is among Britain’s most distinguished China specialists. He has written very widely on modern and contemporary China and has experience not only in academia, but also in the British diplomatic service. He has some Australia experience, having directed the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney from 2012 to 2015. (more…)

Towards the end of his book, after referring to the NACC initial decision not to investigate alleged misbehaviour and to the completion of the APSC’s code of conduct investigation, Rick Morton states:

‘a large group of the senior management of the Australian Public Service … would like that to be the end of things, as if robodebt was the result of a few bad actors and not the inevitable crisis that springs from a sclerotic institution.’

It is a conclusion that, sadly, I largely agree with.

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I turned 90 recently after a long retirement following decades as an academic and an aquatic scientist working on the zooplankton of Australian and Antarctic waters. But now, every day of my life, there’s something deeply corrosive that eats into my psyche and it’s nothing to do with any fear or dread associated with my forthcoming demise which may not be too far away. (more…)

Every year or so Australia gets a bulky new book about an Australian war, military action, hero or some other military matter written by what is known as ‘storians. (more…)

Playing against England, in the home Ashes series of 1950–51, Iverson led the Australian bowling averages with 21 wickets at 15.24 runs per wicket. Bamboozling the Poms, in one Test he got 6 for 27. A little known fact is that Jack Iverson’s highest score in all five Tests was 1 not out.

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“Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie, and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.” (more…)