Robin Fleming, Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 490 to 1070 (Penguin, 2011), 458 pages, $24.95 Tim Clarkson, The Picts: A History (John Donald, 2010), 192 pages, £14.99 David Mattingly, An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire 54 BC–AD 409 (Penguin, 2007), 640 pages, $29.95 The Anglo-Saxon story takes another battering in this […]

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Redmond O’Hanlon and Rudi Rotthier, The Fetish Room: The Education of a Naturalist (Profile Books, 2011), 224 pages, £12.99  With his mutton-chop whiskers and snowy-white hair, Redmond O’Hanlon looks like everybody’s idea of the retired nineteenth-century naturalist. In thirty years, he has written some of the most colourful, funny and archly mischievous travel books around. […]

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Andrew Lansdown, Allsorts: Poetry Tricks and Treats (Wombat Books, 2011), 278 pages, $24.95  Andrew Lansdown, many of whose poems have appeared in Quadrant, has here compiled a large collection of his work, mainly shorter poems. It seems primarily intended to introduce children to poetry, but can also be read by adults with pleasure and profit. […]

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When Opera Australia mounted Andre Previn’s operatic version of the classic Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire in 2007, it was the fourteenth production of this opera since its premiere in San Francisco in 1998. Production venues included New Orleans (very appropriately), San Diego, Strasbourg, St Gallen, Turin, Tokyo, London, Dublin and Washington, as […]

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Shimon Cowen, Politics and Universal Ethics (Connor Court, 2011), 120 pages, $22.95 Reading this set of essays readily brings to mind two great and true adages. First, Tacitus’s “When the State is most corrupt, then the laws are most multiplied”; and second, Edmund Burke’s statement: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they […]

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Michael Wilding, The Magic of It (Arcadia/Press On, 2011), $24.95 Michael Wilding’s latest fiction, his eighteenth, is a departure from his earlier work as he slips into the genre of the private investigator, here aptly named Plant. From the moment the phone rings, we know that Plant is in for trouble. The third sentence of […]

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Peter Firstbrook, The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family (Arrow, 2010), 338 pages, $24.95 Prominent politicians typically have an X factor in their background that makes them especially keen to be conspicuously important. Often it is early tragedy, an unusual or difficult parent or forebear or a very strong mother or wife. One […]

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Nicholas Hasluck,  Dismissal, Fourth Estate, 2011, 359 pages, $29.99 Some issues in Australian public life are so important they won’t go away. One is the Petrov Commission and the charge that a “nest of traitors” operated in the Department of External Affairs under Dr Evatt and his departmental head, Dr John Burton. Mark Aarons’s book […]

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Kingsley Amis, Complete Stories, Penguin Classics, 2011, 528 pages, $49.95 Kingsley Amis was a keen mimic. One of his “party pieces”, he once told the Paris Review, was the voice of “FDR as heard by the British over shortwave radio in 1940”. He thought this talent was tied to the writing of fiction, and that […]

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Coming to Terms with the "German Experiment" "But my emotional sympathies are with them in this tortured struggle."                                    Manning Clark on Nazi Germany, October 17, 1939  The recent launch of a new biography of Manning Clark (An Eye for Eternity by Mark McKenna) has resurrected some of the issues that have surfaced over recent […]

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