The novel begins with the burnished quality of something handed down through generations, its opening lines like the first breath of a myth. Seductive in tone and concision, charged with an  aura of enchantment, the early paragraphs of George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964) do more than merely lure the reader into the narrative. In these sentences, Johnston reveals the conviction and control of a master storyteller who, at the outset, establishes his ambition and literary lineage:

My brother Jack does not come into the story straight away. Nobody ever does, of course, because a person doesn’t begin to exist without parents and an environment and legendary tales told about ancestors and dark dusty vines growing over outhouses where remarkable insects might always drop out of hidden crevices.

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, activists, and government. 

Above all, Pettit suggests, political philosophy should be engaged. Aim to understand and move the world. Political philosophy is a guide to what we can do, alone and together. Hence Just Freedom, a volume with intentions captured in the subtitle: A Moral Compass for a Complex World. Amid the noise of political life, Pettit offers principles to shape decisions. For him, justice is freedom, freedom justice. Be clear about what constitutes justice, and you have a robust basis for decisions about life, political communities, and global sovereignty.

Wilhelm II, German Kaiser and King of Prussia, may be a shadowy figure for Australian readers, better known as the butt of funny-scary caricatures in British World War I propaganda or of black humour in popular soldiers’ songs, than as a political player in his own right. He remains enigmatic even for scholars. Some hand him the burden of responsibility for World War I, despite the immediate trigger being the military standoff between two other states altogether, Austro-Hungary and Serbia. Others see him as an incompetent figurehead who merely rubberstamped the territorial ambitions of the German military.

The third and final volume of John C.G. Rohl’s biography, Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile, lays the second view to rest. Wilhelm had a succession of lapdog chancellors, unlike his revered grandfather Wilhelm I, who appointed and placed full confidence in the architect of German unification, Otto von Bismarck, a superb diplomat and a canny domestic politician who pioneered the welfare state. Wilhelm II, considerably less capable and less liberal than his grandfather, had no such figure beside him to counsel or restrain him, and nor was he likely to have listened if he had. Instead, he subjected a succession of ministers to paranoid rants while he planned his grandiose schemes to make Germany the paramount power in Europe and, hence, the world. He was going to destroy the powerful British navy. He was going to build the Baghdad–Berlin railway and unite the Muslim world behind him. He was going to finish off Russian territorial ambitions once and for all. And all this with ‘my’ army and ‘my’ navy, in defence of ‘my’ empire and ‘my’ house, the royal house of Hohenzollern.

Prime ministers seem to value longevity, whether it is Bob Hawke relishing the fact that he served longer than John Curtin and Ben Chifley combined, or John Howard relishing that he served longer than Hawke. But no prime minister is likely to serve as long as Robert Menzies’ sixteen years as prime minister from 1949 to 1966. His record is even more impressive when his earlier term (1939–1941) is included.

It is Menzies’ first term as prime minister that occupies most of Anne Henderson’s Menzies at War. That was when Menzies took Australia into World War II, only for him to resign shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The outbreak of the Pacific War placed Australia in a desperate position, with the country bereft of tanks, modern fighter aircraft, or four-engine bombers, and with most of its navy and army deployed far from home.