Western love affair

Books may furnish a room but they also furnish the mind. As somebody once said, ‘A man is known by the company his mind keeps’. One of my first moves on visiting a home is to check out the bookshelves, to discover something about the owner’s mind. Bob Carr, New South Wales’s longest-serving premier, has conveniently outlined his reading life in this opinionated, sometimes infuriating but always compelling account, which allows us to read his mind without physically visiting his library.

He is, first of all, a signed-up member of the dominant Anglo-Saxon intellectual tradition current since World War II – a sceptical liberalism which distrusts all forms of totalitarianism. His ‘indispensable’ philosopher therefore has to be Isaiah Berlin, who railed against those who sought to perfect mankind through a classless or a racially pure society. His favourite books in the great testamentary literature against totalitarianism are Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1947) (‘the most important book of the twentieth century’) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1973–78) (‘the suffering of millions is now beyond forgetting because of his testimony’). He provides a guide to the analytical and historical studies of the Nazi régime, with some odd omissions; Richard Evans’s authoritative work on the Third Reich is an example here.