This book aims to reflect on the experiential side of writing political lives in the Pacific region. The collection touches on aspects of the life writing art that are particularly pertinent to political figures: public perception and ideology; identifying important political successes and policy initiatives; grappling with issues like corruption and age-old political science questions about le…
J.E. Moyal has been pronounced ‘one of Australia’s most remarkable thinkers’. Yet, he was, essentially, a scientific maverick. Educated in a modest high school in Tel Aviv, he took himself to France to train as an engineer, statistician and mathematician and escaped to England as France fell. It was from outside academia that he entered into communication with the ‘high priest’ of …
In this book, written between 1979 and 2020, Gilbert Lewis distills a lifetime of insights he garnered as a medical anthropologist. He asks: How do beliefs about illness in different societies influence their members’ ability to heal? Despite the advances of Western medicine, what can it learn from non-Western societies that consider sickness and curing to be as much a matter of social relati…
"Woman Between Two Kingdoms explores the story of Dara Rasami, one of 153 wives of King Chulalongkorn of Siam in Thailand during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in a kingdom near Siam called Lan Na, Dara served as both hostage and diplomat for her family and nation. Thought of as a ""harem"" by the West, Siam's Inner Palace actually formed a nexus between the domestic an…
Sir Arthur Tange was perhaps the most powerful Secretary of the Australian Defence Department and one of the most powerful of the great ‘mandarins’ who dominated the Commonwealth Public Service between the 1940s and the 1970s. His strong, and often decisive, influence on both administration and policy was exerted by virtue of his intellectual capacity, his administrative ability and the she…
In this timely new book, international scholars and military professionals come together to explore the strategic consequences of the thawing of the Arctic. Their analyses of efforts by governments and defence, security, and coast guard organizations to address these challenges make timely and urgent reading. Rather than a single national perspective, The Fast-Changing Arctic brings together ci…
Paternalism to Partnership examines the administration of Indian affairs from 1786, when the first federal administrator was appointed, through 2021. David H. DeJong examines each administrator through a biographical sketch and excerpts of policy statements defining the administrator’s political philosophy, drawn from official reports or the administrator’s own writings. The Indian Offic…
Friedrich Hölderlin’s only novel, Hyperion (1797–99), is a fictional epistolary autobiography that juxtaposes narration with critical reflection. Returning to Greece after German exile, following his part in the abortive uprising against the occupying Turks (1770), and his failure as both a lover and a revolutionary, Hyperion assumes a hermitic existence, during which he writes his letters…
Born into a distinguished aristocratic family of the old Habsburg Empire, Hermynia Zur Mühlen spent much of her childhood and early youth travelling in Europe and North Africa with her diplomat father. Never comfortable with the traditional roles women were expected to play, she broke as a young adult both with her family and, after five years on his estate in the old Czarist Russia, with her …
Interrogates whether the British government has learned anything from its interventions in the Middle East, from the 1950s to 2016 Learning from history helps states to create foreign and security policy that builds upon successes and avoids past mistakes. Drawing on a wealth of previously unseen documents, sourced by Freedom of Information requests, together with interviews with government and…