Glyn Davis

Glyn Davis reviews 'Prime Movers: From Pericles to Gandhi: Twelve great political thinkers and what’s wrong with each of them' by Ferdinand Mount

April 2019, no. 410 • 25 March 2019

Describe the twelve most influential thinkers who shaped Western political traditions. Chaos must ensue. Your list will be outrageous, but mine also. Consider whom you leave off the roll-call. Just one woman. No one from Africa or Asia. Only Jesus to represent millennia of Jewish thought. Yet books of lists appeal to publishers. Controversy sells. To call a book Prime Movers with the subtitle From ... (read more)

Glyn Davis reviews 'My Country' by David Marr

December 2018, no. 407 • 12 November 2018

There was excitement. David Marr, newly appointed editor of the National Times at just thirty-three, had agreed to speak with politics students on campus. Volunteers were dispatched to buy the obligatory felafel and cheese, plastic cups, and cask wine, and at 3 pm the famous journalist arrived to address a small but enthusiastic group of undergraduates. ... (read more)

Glyn Davis launches 'The PM Years' by Kevin Rudd

Online Exclusives • 24 October 2018

On 23 October 2018, at Parliament House Canberra, Professor Glyn Davis launched the second volume of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s memoirs, The PM Years. Here is a transcript. ABR is grateful to Professor Davis for allowing us to reproduce his speech. Our review of The PM Years will follow. Neal Blewett reviewed the first volume for ABR.   A decade on … G’day. My name is Glyn Da ... (read more)

Glyn Davis reviews 'The Best Australian Essays 2016' edited by Geordie Williamson

March 2017, no. 389 • 24 February 2017

An annual challenge: how to select essays which capture the moment but live beyond the immediate? For some, rigour matters. The series editor for The Best American Essays invites magazine editors and writers to submit contributions to a Boston postal address. The rules are strict: an essay is a literary work that shows ‘an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought’. It must be printed du ... (read more)

Glyn Davis reviews 'Britain's Europe: A thousand years of conflict and cooperation' by Brendan Simms

September 2016, no. 384 • 22 August 2016

For elections in Britain, the polling stations stay open until late, with counting through to dawn. So it was a sleepless night for many on Thursday, 23 June 2016 watching the Brexit referendum results on BBC1, its impressive graphics showing a divided country with cities supporting Europe, the countryside firmly against. As a new working day began, the count topped the 16.8 million votes required ... (read more)

Glyn Davis reviews 'Think Again' by Stanley Fish

March 2016, no. 379 • 24 February 2016

Should American academics boycott contact with Israeli universities in protest against events in Palestine? The issue has been fiercely debated at many American colleges, argued at meetings of the American Association of University Professors, dilated in the broader media. Those supporting a boycott, writes Stanley Fish in Think Again, rely on an expanded definition of the academic mission. Injust ... (read more)

Glyn Davis reviews 'The Global Republic' by Frank Ninkovich

May 2015, no. 371 • 27 April 2015

‘There’s a greater problem here. This is a president who won’t proudly proclaim American exceptionalism, maybe the first president ever who truly doesn’t believe in that … Look at his foreign policy. Doesn’t believe [in] America as a force for good, it doesn’t seem. Seems like instead, he believes in multilateralism as a goal, not a tactic. He allows foreign capitals to have veto pow ... (read more)

Glyn Davis reviews 'Poiesis: Manufacturing in Classical Athens' by Peter Acton

March 2015, no. 369 • 02 March 2015

On what terms should we interrogate the past? Ancient life can seem essentially unknowable, a place where everything is different, glimpsed only in the words of those who lived then and surviving traces of material culture. The Cambridge classical scholar Sir Moses Finley argued for an interpretation of ancient life bounded by then current civic and religious beliefs. Finley’s The Ancient Econo ... (read more)

Glyn Davis reviews 'Just Freedom: A moral compass for a complex world' by Philip Pettit

August 2014, no. 363 • 01 August 2014

In a recent Prospect interview, distinguished Princeton and ANU scholar Philip Pettit described political philosophy as a conversation around various themes. Some voices focus on power or freedom, others on democracy or the nature of the state. The conversation should extend beyond the academy, argued Pettit, to embrace public intellectuals, journalists, commentators, political scientists, activis ... (read more)

Glyn Davis reviews 'Fire and Ashes: Success and failure in politics' by Michael Ignatieff

May 2014, no. 361 • 29 April 2014

Knowledge gained through academic life is no preparation for political practice. So found Michael Ignatieff, the distinguished Canadian historian and public intellectual. In October 2004 he was teaching at Harvard University when approached by ‘three men in black’. These Liberal Party power brokers suggested Ignatieff leave the classroom and run for office. Fire and Ashes tells what happened n ... (read more)