Raimond Gaita is quoted in his close friend Robert Manne’s new memoir as saying that a ‘dispassionate judgement is not one which is uninformed by feeling, but one which is undistorted by feeling’. That distinction points to one of the many attractive qualities of A Political Memoir: Intellectual combat in the Cold War and the culture wars.

Manne is typically dispassionate in telling the story of his life, but there is an abundance of feeling. The Holocaust – in Manne’s words, the German state’s attempt ‘to rid the Earth of the Jewish people’ – has been the central reference point of his political thought and activity, shaping his understanding of the totalitarianisms of the left and right during his time as a conservative anti-communist through to his later engagements with the question of the Stolen Generations and the brutal government treatment of asylum seekers.