Society

Britain today is no place for young people. The evidence is as familiar as it is stark. One million of the nation’s fourteen million children experienced destitution in 2022, meaning that their families could not afford to adequately feed or clothe them or keep them warm. In 2024, a record 150,000 lived in temporary accommodation in England. The long-standing decline in infant mortality has stalled. Facts like these, concerning the families struggling most, are often cited as proof of atrophy under Conservative austerity (which, while destructive in its own right, degraded Britain’s resilience against Covid-19 and the energy crisis that followed) and as indicators of the issues that Keir Starmer’s new Labour government should prioritise. But what do we miss by focusing on the worst-off?

This new book by Clive Hamilton and Myra Hamilton provides a detailed and elegantly written analysis of the nature and causes of inequality in Australia – a problem that has increased markedly over the past forty years. The study focuses on the role of élite privilege, rather than on wealth itself. The authors assert that élite privilege – which they regard as a species of advantage distinct from that of male and racial privilege – has not been sufficiently theorised and, more importantly, is hidden in plain view. The aim of the book is to ‘make visible the practices, beliefs and attitudes that characterise elite privilege and allow its reproduction’. A large part of the book, written by this father and daughter team, is concerned with demonstrating the ways in which the non-meritocratic nature of Australian society is systematically concealed.

The Relationship Is the Project is a guidebook to working with communities. The work explicitly asks the reader to consider not only how art is created but from where that art comes – and it so often comes from community.

Marina Kamenev’s Kin begins with a calmly unadorned outline of the nuclear family’s recent fortunes. In the space of just a few pages, she gives a condensed tour of the concept’s history, concluding with US historian Stephanie Coontz’s suggestion that the nuclear family is a ‘historical fluke’ – one that has, as Kamenev puts it, ‘been idolised long after its use-by date’. The introduction’s mini-tour prefigures, in capsule form, both the book’s thematic emphases and its guiding rhetorical procedures. As Kin’s chapters move through their discussions of the moral panics that accompany non-nuclear family structures, from same-sex parenthood to chosen childlessness to single-parent families, the book reveals that the real moral hazards of reproductive technology lie not in deviations from the nuclear model but in attempts to impose the model where it doesn’t fit.

Max Dupain's portrait of Jean Lorraine, a favourite model among Sydney’s artists and photographers of the 1930s and 1940s, graces the elegant cover of Paul Dalgarno’s Prudish Nation. All that gives a somewhat misleading impression of the nature of this book. It is not a work of history. Nor is it an investigation of whether Australia is a notably prudish nation. The variety of gender and sexual identities examined certainly does not leave an impression of prudishness. If Australia was once prudish, it is obviously less so now.

As a gynaecologist and feminist, I figured that this book would have little new to teach me. By page four, I realised I was wrong. Kate Clancy, an anthropologist by training and a serious researcher into the science underlying menstruation, takes her readers on an adventurous romp through every physiological, political, and social aspect of this monthly bloodletting and tissue-shedding that virtually all women (and other people with uteruses) experience hundreds of times during their reproductive years – myth-busting as she goes.

For over a decade, Naomi Klein – the avowedly left-wing Canadian journalist and activist, best known for her first and third books, No Logo: Taking aim at the brand bullies (1999) and The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism (2007) – has been ‘chronically confused’ for ‘the other Naomi’, American writer Naomi Wolf, who first made her name with the feminist best seller The Beauty Myth (1990). Across that period, Klein’s ‘big-haired doppelganger’ has morphed into ‘one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation’ of recent times, a development that has led some to remark that Wolf is in fact a ‘doppelganger of her former self’.

The life of a spy is based on lies, but both these books make an attempt to separate fact from fiction in the stories of their subjects. 

Only rarely does a book of political philosophy inspire a media commotion. Well, at least a small stir – glowing reviews in leading British newspapers, BBC interviews, a speech at the Royal Academy of Arts, praise from the archbishop of Canterbury. Daniel Chandler, LSE economist and philosopher, is the thinker of the moment.

'State-of-the-nation’ books are a tricky genre: for every The Lucky Country (1964), Donald Horne’s bestselling indictment of 1960s Australia, there must be at least a dozen more which fall swiftly into obsolescence. Yet this common fate is not necessarily a bad thing: such books are meant to be timely, not timeless. As an intervention into the contemporary moment, such texts’ success or value resides in fresh and useful analysis which is currently lacking elsewhere; and the ability of the author to capture a mood that is, if not ‘national’, at least pervasive enough to be widely recognisable. At the same time, it helps if that mood has not yet been properly articulated. To raise the bar further, the best of them offer both vital historical perspective and a path forward, and are written in a persuasive and accessible style which stops short of polemic but resists hesitant equivocation.