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.

Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor, by Eamon Duffy; Yale University Press, 2009, $40.95.

As every schoolchild—well, actually nothing like every schoolchild, especially in Australia, but perhaps every reasonably educated person of a certain age—knows, Mary Tudor was a bloodthirsty Catholic hag who managed to weasel her way onto the rightfully Protestant (or at least Anglican) throne of England. She and her pathetic foreign husband then proceeded to kill everyone in sight until Mary herself mercifully died without living issue. England then got back to being decent and reformist and full of constitutional rights and riches for everyone except slaves (reintroduced to England by Elizabeth I) and Catholics.

The Outsider: A Portrait of Ursula Hoff, by Colin Holden; Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009, $49.95.

This detailed and thoughtful biography of Dr Ursula Hoff AO OBE (1909–2005) appears in her centenary year. It is based largely on research by the author, a professional historian, into the surviving diaries kept by Dr Hoff, now in private hands, and other sources including Hoff papers deposited in the University of Melbourne Archives.