Much more than another mere hack and transcriber of favoured politicians' talking points, David Marr's Quarterly Essay assault on Tony Abbott confirms his place as the Left's pre-eminent enforcer

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The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House by Edward Klein Regnery, 2012, 256 pages, US$16.77  Not until the first week of June did it dawn on America’s liberal-leftist mainstream media, which constitutes the virtual entirety of America’s mainstream media with the exception of Fox News and various populist radio stations, that The One might […]

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Tony Abbott’s address to the Institute of Public Affairs, titled Freedom Wars, confirms a monumental re-alignment in politics in Australia.

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Shimon Peres in conversation with David Landau, Ben-Gurion: A Political Life (Schocken Books, 2011), 240 pages, US$25.95  David Ben-Gurion’s political philosophy, according to Shimon Peres, was surprisingly pragmatic for someone so principled. Ben-Gurion’s capacity for compromise literally put Israel on the map and his facility for honourable compromises goes a long way to explaining the […]

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Masha Gessen,  The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (Riverhead Books, 2012), 304 pages, US$27.95  David Satter, It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway (Yale University Press, 2011), 400 pages, US$29.95 In December 1564, Ivan IV took himself off into exile. From the remoteness of Aleksandrova Sloboda […]

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James Delingpole,  Killing the Earth to Save It: How Environmentalists Are Ruining the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Jobs (Connor Court, 2012), 320 pages, $29.95 The Green movement, contends James Delingpole in Killing the Earth to Save It, is essentially a religion with a “suicidal, mankind-hating, technology-loathing, apocalyptic vision of the world”. Delingpole […]

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In October 1979 I found myself, through no feat of my own, living the high life in a provincial city in the People’s Republic of China. I was twenty-two years old.

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In October 1979 I found myself, through no feat of my own, living the high life in a provincial city in the People’s Republic of China. I was twenty-two years old and had just completed an honours degree in Politics at the University of Adelaide, the title of my thesis being “Micro-Computer Technology and Contemporary […]

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All those fabulous sociological details about the Germani in his history were bogus. Tacitus simply made it all up, borrowing from standard Roman stereotypes about foreigners.

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The customary bookends of human existence are the golden age or paradise of childhood and the private apocalypse that marks every individual’s End of Time. The intervening period, which comprises the balance of our lives, allows us to be productive and responsible adults. For the most part we muddle through life in a matter-of-fact way […]

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