![deutscher](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/deutscher-1.jpg)
Raised on the Milk of the Wild Beast
A century after the great October putsch, it is interesting to return to what was written fifty years afterwards rather than a hundred years afterwards, so I dug out Isaac Deutscher’s book of essays Ironies of History: Essays on Contemporary Communism, published by Oxford in 1966. Such books have now gone the way of antimacassars and whalebone corsets, but that does not mean that they are entirely uninstructive. Indeed, there is probably no such thing as an entirely uninstructive book.
At the time Deutscher (above) published his Ironies, the Soviet Union seemed as permanent a feature of the modern world as, say, global warming. Deutscher himself had by then entered his brief phase (he died a year later) as superstar of the New Left, partly on account of his three-volume biography of his hero Trotsky, which offered willing dupes the hope of a humanistic totalitarianism, and more importantly because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, during which he formed a tactical alliance…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins