Edmund Burke, by Dennis O’Keeffe; Continuum, 2010, 167 pages, £65.

Continuum’s “Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers” series continues with Dennis O’Keeffe’s excellent volume on Edmund Burke. Clearly, Burke, who insisted that “Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed”, was hardly a libertarian, but he is generally regarded as a major conservative thinker. Thus Robert Grant declared, “In some ways Burke is the greatest of all political thinkers” and ranked him even above Aristotle. Of course, Burke has had his detractors and O’Keeffe examines a number of “cases” against him—yet Burke is acquitted on every count. This book, however, is more than a vindication of Burke; it also offers new interpretation of his significance both as a man and as a thinker. O’Keeffe’s overall conclusion is that Burke is best described as a “Genial Olympian”—praise indeed.  

 Folk Tunes, by Alan Gould; Salt, 2009, 80 pages, $24.95.

Folk Tunes is one of the most enjoyable and intellectually engaging new volumes of verse I have read in recent years. It is Alan Gould’s most accomplished to date. Here we find the poet moving freely between light and serious verse and blurring the line between them, as the light carries the burden of the serious and the serious is relieved of its weight by its very sense of proportion and perspective. Whether serious or light, the poems in this volume are always consummately crafted, suggestive by turns of the structures of Gothic cathedrals on the one hand, and the sturdy yet delicate, perfectly designed skeletons of birds on the other—in both cases, the structures allow the poems to soar and cause the reader to “lift up heart, eyes”.

 Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power, by Robert E. Sullivan; Harvard University Press, 2010, 624 pages, US$39.95.

Of those works published on Thomas Babington (later Lord) Macaulay (1800–1859), the most notable is the superb 1973 biography by John Leonard Clive, Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian, which describes the first half of the life of a highly talented and successful man of letters. In purchasing and then reading this latest biography of Macaulay, written, as it happens, by one of Clive’s students, I was expecting, even hoping, to find a warm, fond account of the Macaulay of the Essays and The History of England, the eminent literary figure of his day and popular historian who cast such a long shadow over his era. Instead, Sullivan’s Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power is a quite different book. 

 The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000,  by Chris Wickham; Penguin, 2009, 720 pages, $29.95.

The barbarians who pushed through the gates into the Roman empire were not all bad, but neither were they all good. This is the sober-sided conclusion of this latest attempt at a “definitive” history of what is best known as the “Dark Ages”, the six centuries from the collapse of the Roman empire of the west early in the fifth century AD through to the eleventh century. Wickham says the old “catastrophist” historian’s reading of the “barbarian” conquest began to decline around the end of the Second World War, but he cautions against the excessive revisionism which has shown much romantic light in the dark.

Diggers and Greeks: The Australian Campaigns in Greece and Crete, by Maria Hill;  UNSW Press, 2010, 496 pages, $59.95.

Anzac Fury: The Bloody Battle of Crete 1941,  by Peter Thompson; William Heinemann, 2010, 506 pages, $49.95.

It is always a pleasure to read a well informed, passionately argued case for righting a wrong, such as Maria Hill’s Diggers and Greeks: The Australian Campaigns in Greece and Crete. Dr Hill seeks to show that British, Australian and New Zealand historians have (with some exceptions) denigrated, minimised or simply blotted out the part played by the Greeks and Cretans in the campaigns of 1941. Having explored Greek as well as British and Commonwealth records, she demonstrates the value of the Greek and Cretan contribution to important battles (never shirking negative assessments when called for). The formidable fighting spirit of the people, and of the militia groups and gendarmerie, fills in the picture. Varying from place to place and between senior officers and lower ranks, everywhere dogged by unresponsive allies and by lack of arms, ammunition, food and information, Greek and Cretan troops and civilians filled far more significant roles than emerge from most campaign histories in English. It is fascinating to read Greek and Cretan rebuttals of accusations made by British and Commonwealth critics, and of their disappointment with (what seemed to them) less than wholehearted allies. I would have welcomed more of the Greek perspective.