Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is the most powerful media organisation in the world. Murdoch's commercial success is obvious, but less well understood is his successful pursuit of political goals, using News Corp as his vehicle.David McKnight uncovers Murdoch's crusade for his unique brand of conservatism over three decades.

Drawing on extensive original research, McKnight tracks NewsCorp's pursuit of conservative ideas, from Reagan and Thatcher to the Tea Party and its war on Barack Obama. He shows how Murdoch's political connections underpinned the scandal of phone hacking in Britain and thwarted investigation. He examines the secretive corporate culture of News Corporation: its private political seminars for editors, its sponsorship of think tanks and its recurring editorial campaigns around the world. Its success is reflected in the fact that the campaigns are familiar to us all: small government and market deregulation, skepticism on climate change, support for neo-conservative adventures such as Iraq and relentless criticism of all things 'liberal'.

For all its power and influence, News Corporation is now in a profound crisis. The mobile phone hacking scandal has irreparably tarnished its reputation. Its ability to use its news media to bully politicians may be fatally weakened.

In the longer term its confident free market ideology is no longer the orthodoxy since the arrival of Obama and the global financial crisis. His unwavering support for the invasion of Iraq has backfired and his flip-flopping on climate change has discredited him. News Corporation faces an uncertain future as digital technology eats into his newspaper empire which has been the basis of Murdoch's political power.

In 9-11, published in November 2001 and arguably the single most influential post-9/11 book, internationally renowned thinker Noam Chomsky bridged the information gap around the World Trade Center attacks, cutting through the tangle of political opportunism, expedient patriotism, and general conformity that choked off American discourse in the months immediately following. Chomsky placed the attacks in context, marshalling his deep and nuanced knowledge of American foreign policy to trace the history of American political aggression - in the Middle East and throughout Latin America as well as in Indonesia, in Afghanistan, in India and Pakistan - at the same time warning against America's increasing reliance on military rhetoric and violence in its response to the attacks, and making the critical point that the mainstream media and public intellectuals were failing to make: any escalation of violence as a response to violence will inevitably lead to further, and bloodier, attacks on innocents in America and around the world.                                  

The speeches collected in After Words, virtuosic in their scale and range of subjects, are remarkably the work of one eye and one mind: that of former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating. The speeches reveal the breadth and depth of Keating's interests - be they cultural, historical, or policy-focused - dealing with subjects as broad as international relations, economic policy and politics. Individual chapters range from a discussion of Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House through to the redesign of Berlin, the history of native title, the challenge of Asia, the role of the monarchy, to the shape of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 and more. After Words contains an analytic commentary on Australia's recent social and economic repositioning by the man viewed by many as its principal architect. The speeches go beyond observations, as Paul Keating sketches out new vistas and points to new directions. For those interested in matters relating to the future of Australia and the world, After Words presents, unmediated, a panoply of issues which the inimitable mind and writing style of Paul Keating has sculpted into a recognisable landscape.

Author Biography: Paul Keating was Australia's Treasurer (1983-91) and Prime Minister (1991-96). He championed a clutch of seminal changes to the country, including the reorientation of Australia's strategic and trade relationships with Asia, promoting Australia's shift to a republic, the development of a major legal structure to return lands to Australia's indigenous people and significant fiscal reforms which underpinned twenty years of economic growth. Paul Keating maintains his interest in politics, economics and foreign policy and contributes occasionally to the public debate. He is committed to aesthetic interests in architecture, the decorative arts and the romantic repertoire in classical music.                                            


Released November 2011

Australians see themselves as a relaxed and tolerant bunch. But scratch the surface and you'll uncover an extraordinary level of panic about politics, art, sexuality, drugs, boat people, protest, religion and terror. Through it all, David Marr has stood tall to question the hubris, ignorance and deception that lie behind the frenzies.

Over seventy years the dinner table became a stage for Churchill's brilliant conversational talents, an intimate world in which both gossip and diplomatic secrets could be shared, and a confidential arena where he could debate with the great minds of his time the problems of a difficult century and their possible solutions.


Released December 2011

When Julia Gillard - a woman who was unmarried, childless, and an atheist - became Australia's first female prime minister after the 2010 election, opposition leader Tony Abbott was left boiling with rage. It was bad enough that he had lost, but to have to lost to a woman was shameful. For a few days he could not bring himself to call her Prime Minister or even look her in the eyes. Beyond these particular events, and behind his boyish grin and easy charm, women sense in Abbott a man who has no respect or tolerance for the social changes that they have fought so hard to achieve. He is affronted by their demands to be equals with men, and to be given the right to control their own bodies and lives. For Abbott, these recent changes to the traditional male order are aberrations, and he sees his role as one of restoring traditional conservative male values. The proper roles for women in Abbott's world are those of mothers, wives, daughters - all of whom, even if they are employed, support and enable men to achieve their rightful place in the world. As nuns are to the Pope, they should not be allowed to take control of powerful positions in the traditional male hierarchy. It is no mere tactic that has seen Tony Abbott reverting with gusto to to his bomb-throwing style, all his political energy aimed at demolishing Julia Gillard and the government. There is, still time, he believes, to achieve the position which he and his male mentors believe he was destined to have, that of leading his country back to 'the proper order of things'.

Author Biography: Susan Mitchell is well known for her ground-breaking book Tall Poppies. She has published fourteen books, including a recent biography of Margaret Whitlam. Most of her books have narrated and analysed the lives of women in politics, business, sport, literature, and other major aspects of Australian society.                                            

Winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2011. Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the Western world in less than fifteen years. It lead to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known. Dikotter's extraordinary research within Chinese archives brings together for the first time what happened in the corridors of power with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. This groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.

Daily Express Review: 'A masterpiece of historical investigation into one of the world's greatest crimes' New Statesman 'It is hard to exaggerate the achievement of this book in proving that Mao caused the famine ... only thanks to brilliant scholarship such as this will the heirs of the vanished millions finally learn what happened to their ancestors' Sunday Times 'The most authoritative and comprehensive study of the biggest and most lethal famine in history. A must-read' Jung Chang 'Gripping ... Prof Dikotter's painstaking analysis of the archives shows Mao's regime resulted in the greatest "man-made famine" the world has ever seen'

When Lindsay Tanner resigned in 2010 as the ALP's federal minister for finance and member for Melbourne, having had an 18-year career as an MP, he notably managed to retire with his reputation for integrity intact. In Sideshow, he lays bare the relentless decline of political reporting and political behaviour that occurred during his career. Part memoir, part analysis, and part critique, Sideshow is a unique book that tackles the rot which has set in at the heart of Australian public life.