Media bosses, like policemen, are not always loved but they […]

Lucy Wooding’s Tudor England is a very good book -- fair in tone and with a vividness that can make you feel you are there. If there is a quibble with her perspective it is the very modern suggestion that the rift with Rome might have been less bloody. It's a nice thought, but inspired by post-WWII ecumenicalism rather than the global politics of the Reformation

Lord Northcliffe, the brash young newspaper baron, was perhaps the […]

There is nothing wrong with newspaper executives and politicians discussing events. It is why and how they do it that matters. Sally Young’s worthwhile new book, Paper Emperors, gives us an idea, including many an embarrassment and idiosyncrasy over 138 years of Australian media history

Better known as Lord Northcliffe, Alfred Harmsworth was the dynamo who built a newspaper empire the like of which would not be seen again until Rupert Murdoch bettered him many years later. The lord of Fleet Street might have appreciated that, since it was his mentoring of Keith Murdoch that put ink in the family's veins, as author Andrew Roberts details in a new biography

In 1839 an Old Bailey judge sentenced eleven-year-old Ellen Miles […]

Peter Dowling's 'How Epidemics  Nearly Wiped Out Australia’s First Peoples' asks how much blame is due colonialism? The glib and far too common answer is that 'whites shouldn’t have been here at all', thereby attributing all guilt to the First Fleet. Missing from that response is any recognition that centuries of isolation left the indigenous population bereft of resistance and immunity

Richard Broome snipes unkindly at Keith Windschuttle and Quadrant in 'Aboriginal Australians' for daring to question what might be called the Academic Aboriginal History Club. The redeeming virtue of his book, as far as this reviewer is concerned, is that he is sufficiently sensible to raise the hope that a truce in the history wars, while not imminent, might some day come to pass

The argument for going to war seemed to be that if Japan gave  in to American pressure it would lose its grip on China, which it had gained at great cost in lives.  After that, the deeper Japan slid into the morass of world aggression, the harder it was to get out. Eighty years ago today, the attack on Pearl Harbour meant there could be no avoiding a dreadful retribution