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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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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Mark Steyn, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (Regnery, 2011), 400 pages, $45.95 Some Baby Boomers regard Mark Steyn as the social commentator who has most betrayed his generation. But there might be an argument that Steyn, born in 1959, does not properly qualify as a Boomer. He was too young in 1967 to appreciate […]

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One of the more disturbing moments in Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right—no small thing in a treatise teeming with disturbing moments—is this:  Was capitalist modernity really necessary? How does one weigh the value of modern science and human liberty against the spiritual goods of tribal societies? What happens when we place democracy in the […]

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Lindsay Tanner, Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy (Scribe, 2011), 240 pages, $32.95. Shortly after the ALP’s resounding victory in the 2007 federal election, psychologist-activist Steve Biddulph wrote a triumphalist missive for the Sydney Morning Herald assuring us that “Rudd and Gillard are not in power for power’s sake” and that together they would make Australia “a […]

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