Bantam Press

I’ve interviewed Stephen Hawking twice. On both occasions it was in his old office in Silver Street, Cambridge – in front of his huge poster of Marilyn Monroe. The first time, in 1989, I was a little anxious, not because I was with the world’s best-known scientist, but because I found the awkward silences waiting for his answers hard to manage. What do you do, having asked a question, during the two or three minutes it takes him to put together a sentence on his machine? You can’t stare at him for that long – we’re not equipped to do that with anyone for more than seconds. Ignore him? The way we ignore other crippled folk, without realising it? Hardly!

The Barton family of Susan Johnson’s Life in Seven Mistakes is ‘unhappy after its own fashion’, to quote Tolstoy’s famous dictum. Elizabeth Barton’s perspective dominates the narrative. A 49-year-old ceramicist who lives in Melbourne and is preparing for her first exhibition in New York, Elizabeth is under pressure to complete some pieces needed for her opening. With her third husband, Neil, Elizabeth and her three children are spending Christmas with her parents. Bob and Nancy Barton have retired to the Gold Coast where they live in a vulgar, ferociously air-conditioned apartment. Also there are one of Elizabeth’s brothers, Robbie, with his wife, Katie, and their two children. The youngest brother, Nick, is in jail for drug offences and erased from the family narrative, but he is ever-present in Elizabeth’s mind.

Despite predictions that globalisation would homogenise cultures, ethnicity continues to split states asunder. Democratic theorists fear that consensus, equality and social capital are retreating before competition, materialism and resentment. The 2004 federal election campaign became a festival of individualism as alternative governments courted voters not with visions of a richer community but with promises of greater disposable household income after health and education costs.

Here is what veteran war correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winner Peter Arnett has to say about American political deliberation in the information age: ‘Government decisions are made by an inside group of Congress and the American public largely doesn’t give a damn. When they vote they don’t vote in terms of international policies; they vote in terms of local issues.’ New Zealand-born Arnett first worked in Vietnam for Associated Press, then in 1981 joined and subsequently became the voice and face of CNN. He has interviewed both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. How does he explain the US myopia he diagnoses? By looking at the news sources most Americans use: ‘They get talkback radio, which is skewed to the right usually; they look at a bit of television and maybe some magazine shows, and that is it. They don’t give a shit.’ But does he blame them? No. The controversial journalist (CNN, under pressure from government, dismissed him when he fronted a programme that accused the US of using sarin gas on American defectors in Laos) blames his own profession, or at least that part of the profession with corporate clout. ‘All this is the media’s fault. It is the newspapers’ fault for not including a page or two of international news every day so that people, like it or not, are going to see it.’ Nor does Amell spare the television networks: ‘CNN should be doing more, even though it has limited viewership; it should be doing more than covering celebrity stuff now, which it does domestically. Fox is a joke. There is an ignorance that is growing in America and it is frightening.’