Recent publications in IPA Review article
The moral code of Grand Theft Auto IV
Want to steal cars and shoot cops? Then Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV) is the videogame for you. You won't be the only one playing it: released for the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 in April this year, it's the game of 2008. In its first...
Have bad movies edged out good?
Chris Berg reviews Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics. It may not come as a surprise that Hostel: Part II, the 2007 movie which depicts nearly an hour and a half of brutal, explicit and uninterrupted torture, is...
Rudd's summit misses the point of policy
Kevin Rudd's government was inspired early into its term to call upon Australia's ‘one-thousand most intelligent people' to nominate themselves to be invited to a talkfest in Canberra to harvest ideas. Leading opposition politicians quickly...
Why smart people believe stupid things
In February this year I organised a colloquium on what we called ‘Weird History'. It focused on some of the strange and downright preposterous versions of history that are currently floating around. These included Gavin Menzies' fiction...
John Stuart Mill's odd combination: philosopher kings & laissez faire
Andrew Kemp reviews John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand by Richard Reeves. To many, John Stuart Mill was the greatest ‘public intellectual' of the last 200 years. His topics of interest were limitless-his Collected Works span 33 volumes....
Microtrends may be small, but that doesn't mean they are important
Tim Wilson reviews Microtrends: The small forces behind today's big changes by Mark J Penn. On January 20, 2009 it will be clear whether Mark Penn is a brilliant political strategist, or just a statistician with an eye for the unusual. Penn was,...
Australian history's forgotten capitalists
John Roskam reviews Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy by Peter Cochrane. Melbourne University's strategy for marketing Peter Cochrane's Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy is almost as interesting as the...
'God is love': the politics of bills of rights
Eddy Gisonda reviews Bills of Rights and Decolonization by Charles O.H. Parkinson. In 1988, Sir Anthony Mason stood before the Bicentennial Conference of the Australian Bar Association and announced his tentative support for a national bill of...
News flash: war exciting, federation dull
Richard Allsop reviews History's children: History wars in the classroom by Anna Clark. This would be an easy book to ridicule. Manning Clark's granddaughter leaves the politically correct university staff room and discovers that in real world...
A hatchet job and the Holocaust
Despite Irene Nemirovsky, author of Suite Francaise, having died in Auschwitz, the left have turned her into a self-hating Jew. Nemirovsky had been arrested in France in 1942, being a foreign Jew, and deported to Auschwitz where she died of...