Robert Phiddian

Robert Phiddian reviews 'The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation' by Julianne Schultz

October 2022, no. 447 • 27 September 2022

A new monarch succeeded the day I sat down to write this review about the idea of Australia. Prime Minister Albanese, in a blessedly unpoliticised speech about Elizabeth II’s death, was direct in announcing that he and the governor-general would be heading to London, ‘where we will meet the king’. ... (read more)

Robert Phiddian reviews 'Alexander Pope in the Making' by Joseph Hone

August 2021, no. 434 • 22 July 2021

If you are looking for the perfect command of voice, Alexander Pope is your poet. It is not just desiccated eighteenth-century rationalists who say this, my Keats-scholar friend Will Christie thinks so too. This is despite the fact that there is zero negative capability in Pope, ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reaso ... (read more)

Robert Phiddian reviews 'Drawing the Line: Using cartoons as historical evidence' edited by Richard Scully and Marian Quartly

April 2010, no 320 • 01 April 2010

It is no secret that scholarly publishing is between a rock and a hard place these days. The rock is the proliferation of titles demanded by university research quanta and government assessment exercises. The hard place is the endless tightening of library acquisitions budgets. The result is ever-shrinking print runs, ever-growing covert or explicit publication subsidies and a rational but extreme ... (read more)

Robert Phiddian reviews 'An Essay on Man' by Alexander Pope, edited by Tom Jones

December 2016, no. 387 • 30 November 2016

For the novice, Alexander Pope’s couplets can seem a numbing wilderness of equipoise – rhyme balanced against rhyme, half lines balanced around the caesura, regular iambs marching on to the end of pentametrical time (alternatively ‘to the edge of doom’). With a bit of experience as a reader, however, it is the wrought tension of Pope’s couplets that fascinates. The balance is only ever p ... (read more)

Robert Phiddian reviews 'Jonathan Swift: His life and his world' by Leo Damrosch

May 2014, no. 361 • 30 April 2014

Twelve years after Swift’s death, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu showed a visitor to her house in Venice a commode lined with books by Pope, Bolingbroke, and Swift. This, she explained, ‘gave her the satisfaction of shitting on them every day’. We still don’t know exactly what it was that caused her to fall out with Swift, Pope, and their friends in the 1720s, but there’s no questioning the e ... (read more)

Robert Phiddian reviews 'Taking Stock' edited by Mark Finnane and Ian Donaldson

June 2013, no. 352 • 27 May 2013

This is a highly intelligent collection of essays by some of the nation’s finest minds about the ebb and flow of intellectual endeavour in the humanities since the institution of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1969. In the thirty-one essays – built around keynotes, panels, and responses – there are too many gems among them for me to be willing to pick out individual contribution ... (read more)

Robert Phiddian reviews 'Bad News: Murdoch’s Australian and the Shaping of the Nation' (Quarterly Essay 43) by Robert Manne

November 2011, no. 336 • 25 October 2011

Were I Editor in Chief of The Australian for a day, the first thing I would do is can the ‘Cut and Paste’ section on the Letters page. Its schoolyard bullying of the fools and knaves idiotic enough to oppose the paper’s line – usual suspects include Fairfax journalists, the ABC, Greens politicians, Tim Flannery, and Robert Manne – lies at the heart of what stops The Australian from ... (read more)