Robert Manne

On Borrowed Time is a great new collection of Robert Manne’s essays, harvested partly from his Quarterly Essays and The Monthly (which are Schwarz Publishing media), but also from The Conversation, The Good Weekend, The Guardian, The Weekend Australian and The Monthly’s Blog. Because I read some of these publications regularly I have already read some of these essays (and reviewed QE #43 Bad News, Murdoch’s Australian and the Shaping of the Nation an excerpt from which is the first in The Murdoch Empire section), so what I’ve done here is to group the essays by their source so that you can see whether the book is good value for you (as it is for me).
The table of contents groups the essays under the headings and I’ve tagged them with their initials:
Climate Change (CC)
The Murdoch Empire (TME)
Australian Politics (AP)
Australia and Asylum Seekers (A&AS)
Australian History (AH)
The United States (TUS)
The Islamic State (TIS) and
The University (TU)

The sources of the essays are:

The Monthly: ‘Dark Victory’ 2012 (CC); ‘Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything’ 2015; ‘Rupert Murdoch’s Politics’ 2013 (TME); ‘Malcolm Turnbull, the Promise’ 2012 (AP); ‘Malcolm Turnbull, a Brief Lament’ 2017 (AP); ‘Tragedy of Errors’ 2013 (A&AS); ‘Burchett and the KGB’ 2013 (AH); ‘While Rivers Run Red’ 2016 (AH); ‘Julian Assange: Alex Gibney’ 2013 (TUS); ‘The Snowden Files’ 2014 (TUS); ‘Julian Assange: Laura Poitras 2017 (TUS); ‘The Mind of the Islamic State 2016 (TIS);

The Guardian: ‘Explaining our Failure’ 2013 (CC); Jonathan Franzen, This Changes Nothing 2015 (CC); ‘On Refugees, Both the Left and Right are Wrong’ 2014 (A&AS); ‘The Sorry History of Australia’s Apology’ 2013 (AH);

The Monthly Blog:
‘Laudato Si, a Political Reading’ 2015 (CC); ‘Andrew Bolt, “Name Ten” ‘ 2011 (TME); ‘The Second Rudd Government?’ 2012 (AP); ‘Labour’s Long Goodbye’ 2012 (AP); ‘There is a Solution to Australia’s Asylum-Seeker Problem’2016 (A&AS);

Quarterly Essay (or its correspondence): ‘Bad News’, 2011 (TME); ‘Noel Pearson and Indigenous Constitutional Recognition’ 2014 (AH)
The Good Weekend:
‘Malcolm Fraser, an Unlikely Radical’ 2014 (AP);

The Conversation:
‘How We Came to Be So Cruel’ 2017 (A&AS); ‘The University Experience – Then and Now’ 2012 (TU)

Weekend Australian:
‘Donald Trump’s Victory’ 2016 (TUS);
‘The Muscovian Candidate?’ 2017 (TUS)

So as you can see, unless you subscribe to this range of publications, the book is good value, and still very relevant even though some of the essays are more than five years old.

What I like about Manne’s essays is that he doesn’t just describe current affairs, he analyses them with piercing clarity. He also looks at issues from surprising points of view. I admit that my heart sank when I saw that the first five essays were about climate change: I have read so much about this and it’s profoundly depressing because we seem to be stuck in a rut that we can’t escape. But the essays turned out not to reproduce the same arguments but to analyse how the nonsense of denialism was achieved, how writers like Franzen are compromised, and – who knew? – that the Pope offers hope because he gets it, he really does:

My own sense, after spending the day reading this remarkable document, was of great relief… This marks the first time that a person of great authority in our global culture has fully recognised the scale and depth of our crisis, and the consequent rethinking of what it means to be fully human’. (Bill McKibben, reviewing the papal encyclical Laudato Si, in the NY Review of Books, quoted by Manne on p. 67)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/04/30/on-borrowed-time-by-robert-manne-bookreview/… (meer)

Robert Manne has long been one of Australia’s leading intellectuals so any writing of his is welcome. Here, he lays out the background of some of the biggest events in Australian politics in the Twentieth Century, including the myriad splits in the Australian Labor Party, Federation and WWI Conscription.

While it is a useful book to read I sadly didn’t find it as captivating as good history books should. I recently read “Stalingrad” by Antony Beevor and I felt like I was in the trenches with the soldiers but I did not get the same feeling about the essays here. Still, this is well worth a read if you want to understand some of the key events that shaped Australia.… (meer)

The Petrov Affair is a moment that seems to have been pushed into a corner of Australian history, but, as Manne proposes, it's actually one of the key moments in Cold War history, much more well known outside of Australia than within. Whether his statement holds water is up to far brainier types than I but "The Petrov Affair" covers the time during the Cold War when Australia made international news when a Soviet embassy staff member and wife in Canberra defected.

I read this book in Canberra and it was interesting to sit in the hotel that spies sat in a half century previously, attempting to bring down Australia, while an unremarkable house in an equally unremarkable street was the Petrov home until their defection. Also intertwined is the story of HV Evatt, one time President of the United Nations General Assembly, who saw his chances of becoming Prime Minister destroyed due to the after effects of the Petrov Affair (a lot of which was due to his own actions).

A good look at this event by one of Australia's top intellectuals.… (meer)