Thunderbolt: Scourge of the Ranges, by G. James Hamilton with Barry Sinclair; Phoenix Press, 2009, 416 pages, $25.
Popular or, as it is now sometimes condescendingly called, folk history has a long and honourable record It has, at least until recent decades, been the main way Australians learned about their past. Before history turned respectably academic, the great names were Frank Clune and Ion L. Idriess and there were many others.

It would be nice to think this story of the 1860s bushranger Frederick Wordsworth Ward, alias Thunderbolt, heralded a return to the folky side. There is a ripping yarn there somewhere, but it was still trying to get out when the book went to the printer.

The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War, by David Lebedoff;  Scribe, 2008, 264 pages, $29.95.

This intriguing and insightful book has captured much attention and appreciation from readers internationally. Its author is a practising lawyer in Minnesota, who graduated from the Harvard Law School and whose other books include one on the Exxon-Valdez oil spillage litigation. Lebedoff’s present work is a parallel study of aspects of the lives and work of two leading English writers, the atheist George Orwell and the Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh, who at first might seem poles apart in nature, background and outlook—but who prove, on closer analysis, to have shared a deep regard for objective truths and an almost visceral dislike of all “political correctness”. The author’s prologue sets the scene by contrasting a ducal dinner party attended by Waugh in June 1930 “at the height of a brilliant London season”, whilst Eric Blair (later known as George Orwell) was “working alone in a small, shabby room in the working-class section of Leeds” writing Down and Out in Paris and London.

Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, by Tristram Hunt; Metropolitan Books, 2009, US$35.

Karl Marx once famously said that while philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. Since Marx and his intellectual collaborator, Friedrich Engels, did exactly that, judgments of both have ranged from ardent devotion at one extreme to vigorous deprecation at the other. Tristram Hunt occupies the narrow middle ground. Born in 1974, he is an ideal biographer because, despite his links to the Labour Party, he comes to Engels without the partisan feelings of earlier generations. Two decades after the Berlin Wall was demolished, it is perhaps possible to take a more objective approach to Engels and his thought. In Marx’s General (published in the UK as The Frock-Coated Communist), Hunt attempts just this.

The Wizard from the Isles, by Ian Rae; Kennedy & Boyd, 2009, 284 pages, £14.95.
Ian Rae’s strange and compelling novel displays the same lucid, patient, almost mesmerising style familiar from his short stories, published under the name Jack Irvine as In Praise of Younger Women. In some respects the novel is three collections of short stories: the first recounts the childhood of the principal character, Robert Taran, in the islands of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland; the second tells of his adult career, his love affair with an older woman, her death, his subsequent wandering around the world before finally settling in a place where he feels a curious affinity, in France; the third and most startling describes his meeting with other wizards and spirit-projections, who introduce him to his own full capacities as a man with “The Sight” and elemental, subliminal powers, which involve him in various conflicts with wizards given to the Dark Side.

Torn Apart, by Peter Corris; Allen & Unwin, 2010, 240 pages, $29.99.

Torn Apart is the thirty-fifth book from Peter Corris featuring Cliff Hardy. Older, possibly wiser, bruised and somewhat battered, Cliff has now lost his private investigator’s licence. In the previous novel, Deep Water, he suffered a heart attack. What else can go wrong?

How about being confronted by his doppelganger? “The Doppelganger” features in one of the earliest pieces of crime writing published in Australia, a story by Marcus Clarke published in the Australian Monthly Magazine in August 1867. It is cheering to find tradition perpetuated, and well-worn themes refusing, like Sherlock Holmes, to lie down and die. It is part of the appeal of crime fiction, the return of the familiar. The psychiatrist Charles Rycroft theorised that the addictive nature of reading detective novels arose from an obsession with the primal scene, returning to the site of seeing your parents having sex. Though Cliff Hardy is never that much into voyeurism, prurience or weird stuff. In the ranks of contemporary criminal investigators, he remains comparatively clean cut. Not for Corris the serial post-mortems, serial killers and child abusers threatening to colonise the genre.

The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy; Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2009, 544 pages, £25.

The story behind a book title is often interesting in itself, and the competing titles of Adrian Goldsworthy’s latest book are a case in point. In the USA, it was published by Yale University Press as How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower. Yet in the rest of the English-speaking world, the same book was published as The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower.

Why? Goldsworthy provides some hints about this in his preface. In the United States, Roman history is taken seriously by public figures of all kinds, and also academics. The USA has always been conscious of Rome as a prototype republic, a king-rejecting society which went on to great and glorious things. It’s not for nothing that Washington DC bristles with pseudo-Roman public buildings, has a house of parliament known as the Senate, and why George Washington himself appears (in marble) clad in a toga. Americans, says Goldsworthy, are quick to see links between ancient Rome and their own present-day superpower status, and the more unsympathetic fellow travellers among them are also quick to hint at the impending collapse of the “evil republic”.