Archived publication for May 2008 in IPA Review article
Recent publications

Why smart people believe stupid things

IPA REVIEW ARTICLE | Greg Melleuish

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

IPA REVIEW ARTICLE | Andrew Kemp

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

IPA REVIEW ARTICLE | Tim Wilson

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

IPA REVIEW ARTICLE | John Roskam

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

IPA REVIEW ARTICLE | Eddy Gisonda

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

IPA REVIEW ARTICLE | Richard Allsop

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

IPA REVIEW ARTICLE | Sinclair Davidson

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...