For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.
—George Orwell, 1940

It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.
—Karl Marx, in a letter to Engels, 1857

I shall doubtless look back on the second half of 1996 as my period Down Under. Last summer, rummaging through a pile of books destined for the used bookstore, I chanced upon The Killing of History by the Australian historian Keith Windschuttle.

 

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