'Ten weeks in America'
Morag Fraser on the rise of Barack Obama
'At the Centre for Human Value, we waited until after McCain's gracious concession speech before breaking out the champagne. And even then the celebrations were muted. Something so extraordinary had happened that it was hard to find words, and even more difficult to sound trumpets of jubilation.

'The Winston factor'
Geoffrey Blainey on Winston Churchill's relations with
Australia
Few overseas leaders have been as controversial as Winston
Churchill, the great British wartime prime minister, and his influence on Australia was immense and contested for half a
century, notably during the Gallipoli debacle and World War II. Celebrated historian Geoffrey Blainey writes about Graham
Freudenberg's new book, Churchill and Australia.

'The people are disappointed'
Glyn Davis on Simon Schama
'The American Future joins, in self-conscious fashion, a long tradition of writing about America. In this the United States is
fortunate. Its dramatic history has provoked continuous reflections
on the nature of American experience and character. As a Briton living in America for three decades, Schama writes with engagement yet distance.'

'Why Afghanistan?'
Riaz Hassan on the 'chaos' in Pakistan
'Descent into Chaos is a blistering critique of the Bush administrations
failure to establish a viable peace in Afghanistan by reigning in the duplicitous governments of Pakistan, Uzbekistan and other former Soviet central Asian countries.'

'The person defying the group'
Ian Britain on Anna Bemrose's Robert Helpmann
Bemrose […] comes close to neutering her subject, or complying too readily
with his strategic evasions. She hardly seems aware of the posthumous biographer's freedom - responsibility, even - to consider the surfaces and probe whatever may lie beneath them.'