Category: Books & writers

The strange Quadrant hoax

~ Andrew Norton ~ 46 Comments

Crikey, in one of its rare (if minor) scoops, reports that Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle was hoaxed into publishing this piece on scare campaigns and science reporting by mythical biotechnologist Sharon Gould.

But what point is this hoax intended to make?

According to the Crikey article,

In a ruse designed to lampoon Windschuttle’s historical research, which began by checking the footnotes of leading historians, the article contains some false references.

Maybe there is a very small irony here, but there is not much of an analogy. Academic historians writing on their own subject should be held to high standards of accuracy. Editors of generalist magazines publishing tens of thousands of other people’s words a month on a wide variety of topics cannot be expected to check every claim and every reference.

From a reader’s perspective, it’s hard to see the difference between the hoax article and the error-ridden piece Crikey published on think-tanks a few weeks ago, except that “Sharon Gould” lied about his/her true identity, and Crikey‘s Andrew Crook used his real name (I assume; I had never heard of him prior to this). They are both non-credible pieces that ideally should not have been published, but in a world of limited editorial resources they both slipped through the net.

Nor is it at all clear that this hoax has the meaning attributed to it by Crikey journalist Margaret Simons on her blog:
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Conor Cruise O’Brien, RIP

~ Andrew Norton ~ 2 Comments

The Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien, who died last week aged 91, had a very varied career, straddling as his Times obituary says ‘diplomacy, politics, historical scholarship, literature and journalism’.

It was the last three that attracted me, though the first two informed them. I probably first came across him via his introduction to the Penguin edition of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, though I can remember also liking his mid-1980s book on Israel, The Seige, after which in some circles he was known as Conor Cruise O’Zion. From the Times obituary, he wrote it for much the same reason I read it, the influence of Jewish friends. Political views are usually part biography.

In 1994 I interviewed him for Policy, during my first stint as editor. We mostly talked about nationalism, which nearly 15 years on I fear may have annoyed him; presumably he was hoping to publicise his book The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke, which had recently come out in paperback. Re-reading the interview, he knew a surprising amount about Australia, commenting on the history of Catholic-Protestant relations here and praising Noel Pearson.

It’s probably nearly as long ago as that interview since I read O’Brien, and I felt embarrassed as I read the obituaries that I could not recall a single idea, insight or piece of information that I could attribute to his writings. Perhaps they are there in my memory, unattributed. But on dipping into The Great Melody, it’s clear that he was one of those writers with the talent to make reading its own reward.

Conor Cruise O’Brien, RIP.

Booking a date

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

Book reading may be in decline, but being ‘well read’ still has cultural status. A 2005 survey found that a third of people in London and southeast England had bought a book ‘solely to look intelligent’. Now another British survey finds that nearly 40% of respondents admitted to being less than entirely honest about their actual reading habits in order to impress friends and potential partners.

Men are more dishonest than women about their reading (and no doubt much else…), but after seeing the things which would impress women we can have some symapthy for men:

Top ten reads to impress a woman:

1. Nelson Mandela autobiography [Long Walk to Freedom]
2. Shakespeare
3. Cookery books
4. Poetry
5. Song lyrics
6. Current affairs websites
7. Text messages
8. Emails
9. Financial Times
10. Facebook

In between telling lies, this reading list, and celibacy, I can see why some guys choose telling lies.

(Hat tip: Marginal Revolution).

Should politicians use ghost writers?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

I spent most of my weekends in January and February this year writing my chapter for Peter van Onselen’s edited collection Liberals and Power: The Road Ahead. As has recently been reported, not all the other contributors spent quite so much time writing their chapters.

We know this because recycled material has shown that neither Brendan Nelson nor Julie Bishop wrote the chapters that appeared under their names. The Bishop chapter partly plagiarises New Zealand Business Roundtable Executive Director Roger Kerr, and with her chief of staff Murray Hansen taking responsibility for the whole mess we know that he was the author of her contribution (or co-author, with Kerr). Tom Switzer has outed himself as the author of Brendan Nelson’s chapter by repeating some of it in the Australian edition of The Spectator.

Last month I defended Bishop in her previous plagiarism controversy, on the grounds that senior politicians aren’t using their time effectively if they write all their own material. But Louise Adler, the publisher of Liberals and Power, is is taking a much tougher stance in The Age this morning:

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Does plagiarism by politicians matter?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

Someone in Malcolm Turnbull’s office has had a very bad day. It seems that material he or she gave to Julie Bishop, the new Shadow Treasurer, was lifted from The Wall Street Journal. Bishop was subsequently accused of plagiarism.

In some cases plagiarism is clearly a problem. But it is hard to get worked up about it when committed by a politician.

If the sin in plagiarism is passing off other people’s work as your own, then for senior politician it is a sin that they commit just about every day. They rely heavily on advisers (and for those in government, bureaucrats) to prepare speeches, media releases, position papers and correspondence. Their staff are trying to second-guess the politician – to say what he or she would say, if he or she had the time – but nevertheless the words are not the politician’s. Using other people’s words is an occupational necessity; there would be massive efficiency loses if we pedantically insisted on personal authorship.

In this case, the words were copied from someone who was not employed by a politician. But the words were just a news report of information that was widely available in any case, on how the proposed US financial sector rescue package would work. There is no ethical issue here in giving credit to the intellectual or creative work of others, as there is in some plagiarism cases.

Politicians and their staff should paraphrase to spare us these tiresome controversies. But the fact that the Bishop/WSJ borrowing was reported at all reflects the application of norms of original work that properly apply to creative endeavours or when testing student knowledge, but which have little relevance to politics.

The book industry vs book readers

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

Australia’s literati think that we owe them a living. In the Weekend Australian today, author Michael Wilding complains that

Through the years Australian governments have consistently disadvantaged books and writers,

but what he really means is that Australian governments have become less inclined to advantage book publishers, sellers and writers, at the expense of readers and taxpayers.

Wilding’s criticisms aren’t even consistent. He starts by complaining that the GST made books more expensive, yet his very next complaint is about the abolition of retail price maintenance – which prevented booksellers from discounting to make books cheaper!

He says relaxation of copyright rules, so that booksellers could bring in foreign books not published by local copyright holders within 30 days, undermined the importation business he used to maintain his small Australian publishing firm. Unless he was being very inefficient I am not sure why. He could still overcharge provided he did it quickly.
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The Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow, entrant two

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

Though not quite in the same league as my Ernie, my friend Simon Caterson is the first entrant in Lavartus Prodeo’s Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow. The idea is to highlight arguments built on tenuous links, and Simon is entered for managing to jump from a discussion of factual errors in Ishmael Beah‘s book about his time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone to the overwillingness of baby boomers to believe the Samoan research of Margaret Mead.

It is quite a leap, with the thread tying it together being that there are some stories people just want to believe. But the examples of fictional non-fiction given in Simon’s article are too varied to give the article the focus on readers it needed for the Mead case not to appear, at least to a certain kind of vigilant mind, as being there for some other reason. Most of the article is about authors, who range from outright frauds like Norma Khouri, to people like Ishmael Beah who get some details wrong but still have a compelling story, to Margaret Mead who it seems was more the victim of a hoax than a perpetrator.

But none of this is what really caused upset at LP. It was the suspicion that Simon thinks ‘sexual freedom is unnatural and wrong, and you should all stop it now’. And that required a leap in the argument worthy of making LP the second entrant in the Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow. So we go from these remarks by Simon:

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Pick the odd name out

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

Alasdair Macintyre, Colin McGinn, Andrew Norton, Martha Nussbaum, … John Searle, Peter Singer

– from the contributors list in the 1st quarter 2008 issue of The Philosophers’ Magazine

Philosophically-inclined readers will realise that this is a case of a peasant mixing with the intellectual aristocracy, thanks to the egalitarian institution of alphabetical listing. I’m there at all because of my exchange of letters with Alan Soble over The Peel’s door policy, which in turn came about because someone at The Philosophers’ Magazine found this post from May. As I said earlier this month, I don’t think that debate went as well the public school debate with Andrew Leigh, but both seemed to have picked up audiences I would not normally get.

The not-always-reliable Oxford Companion to Australian Politics

~ Andrew Norton ~ 25 Comments

For the last few days, I have been dipping into The Oxford Companion to Australian Politics, edited by Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts. It contains over 400 entries on a wide range of Australian political topics. Many of the contributors are good choices: Ian Hancock on the Liberal Party, Murray Goot on public opinion, Galligan himself on federalism, Peter Coleman on political cartoons, Ian Marsh on think-tanks, and Judy Brett on political culture, just to name a few.

But the trouble is that Galligan and Roberts have also chosen as contributors people who are as much activists as academics on their Companion subject. A hardline lesbian feminist like Sheila Jeffreys is not the kind of person you’d ask to give a even-handed account of pornography or prostitution. But at least Jeffreys can tell the difference between fact and opinion, which is more than you can say for some other authors.

Take the ANU’s museum-piece Marxist, Rick Kuhn, who is given the entry for ‘class’. While unlike Clive Hamilton he probably isn’t ignorant of the sociological research on class in Australia, he does ignore it in favour of a straight Marxist account, right down to implicitly predicting revolution:

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