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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Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (Allen Lane, 2011), 402 pages, $49.95. On March 7, 1989, thirty-two-year-old Winfried Freudenberg’s makeshift balloon crash landed, securing him the posthumous honour of last person to die escaping across the Berlin Wall. A month before, on the night of February 6, Chris Gueffroy, aged twenty, was shot […]

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Patrick Moore, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (Beatty Street Publishers, 2011), 400 pages, US$34.95.  There is a darkly humorous scene in the Wachowskis’ film The Matrix in which the sentient computer program called Agent Smith explains his epiphany about the true nature of human beings:  I’ve realised that you […]

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Roger Scruton, The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope, Atlantic Books, 2010, 232 pages. Roger Scruton’s conservative thinking might be labelled “High Toryism for Common People”. While his work has much of its genesis in English traditionalism, Scruton’s 2005 memoir, Gentle Regrets, is hilariously scathing of those who carried its banner in […]

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George W. Bush, Decision Points (Random House, 2010).  With Decision Points George W. Bush has once again wrong-footed his political foes. How they would love to disparage his tome as tedious and self-serving and at the very same time dismiss it as bogus, ghost-written by somebody else—perhaps Chris Michel, who is mentioned in the acknowledgments and […]

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