Solar, by Ian McEwan; Jonathan Cape, 2010, 285 pages, $32.95.

Let’s suppose it’s true, as George Orwell thought it was, that a good writer’s “emotional attitude” sets in young and is never fully escaped. What kind of kid, then, might Ian McEwan have been?

He was either a very naughty little boy, or, early on, he was made to feel that he was. McEwan is a novelist obsessed with the morality of guilty men. Now sixty-one, in his twelfth novel, Solar, he gives us Michael Beard, a guilty fat man who might just save the world.

Drafting a New Constitution for Australia, by Charles S. Mollison and Ross E. Garrad;

Cobbs Crossing Publications/Foundation for National Renewal, 2009, 491 pages, $32.99.

The First Draft of a Constitution for the Sovereign Nation of Australia, by Charles S. Mollison;Cobbs Crossing Publications/Foundation for National Renewal, 2008, 248 pages, $21.99.

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage…Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberation at its best, the battle is not lost.

—F.A. Hayek

Lieutenant-Colonel Charles S. Mollison (Rtd) commanded Alpha Company 6 RAR in Vietnam in 1966–67. His 2005 book Long Tan and Beyond has, as Brigadier George Mansford wrote in its preface, something for all Australians. In fact the battle of Long Tan was a splendid example of courage in the face of tremendous odds. So much so that afterwards the enemy avoided the region, showing more respect for our men than Australia did in its disgraceful treatment of returning Diggers.

Hobbes and the Law of Nature, by Perez Zagorin; Princeton University Press, 2009, 177 pages, US$29.95.

Thomas Hobbes is known today as the political philosopher who wrote Leviathan. Although quoted frequently—“the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”—Leviathan is nevertheless a classic work comparable to, say, de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America—often cited but seldom read. This is a pity. Hobbes discussed the foundations of sovereign authority and political obligation in a way that still has much relevance.