Battlelines, by Tony Abbott, Melbourne University Press, 2009, $34.99.

Tony Abbott opens his book with a prologue putting the case that Liberals should write more books. Authorship is a risky undertaking for any politician. Public humiliation is part and parcel of political life, and finding one’s opus in the Angus & Robertson two-dollar bin must prick even the toughest of hides, but by all accounts this book is selling well and is unlikely to be remaindered.

When my wife and I married eleven years ago, the priest who celebrated our nuptial mass caused scandal by requesting (it being a Mass celebrated according to the 1962 Missal) that communicants knelt and received the host on the tongue. Benedict XVI’s insistence on the same at the recent World Youth Day Mass is, therefore, a subtle but significant shift.