Though scarcely a teenager at the time, I remember clearly what I was doing when I heard the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. That was a seminal event for the baby-boomer generation – not only in the United States, but around a then barely globalised world. I suspect the equivalent event for young adults today is the horrifying television footage, rebroadcast countless times since, of two passenger aircraft being deliberately flown into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.

Freaking twice, in real life by a grey-green beauty
with sapphire eyes;
their rockpool laboratory ankle-deep under a headland
in a state of collapse.

The claim of this well-intentioned book is to give an account of the Second Battle of Krithia, which was fought on the Gallipoli Peninsula between 6 and 8 May 1915. However, we do not reach the beginning of the battle until page 187, and it ends on page 257. Thus, we have seventy pages out of 320 on the titular topic of this book.

At various times in its history, the Australian Labor Party’s strict insistence that its parliamentarians vote along party lines or face expulsion has caused angst within the party. On the one hand, the practice means that talented party members might be lost to the ALP; on the other, party solidarity is the key to passing legislation and to maintaining cohesion. One of the early architects of Labor’s strict party discipline was J.C. Watson, who was a major figure within the labour movement between 1890 and 1916.

The year 1939 was not so very unlike this one. The United States was being torn apart by bitter political disagreements, and the unresolved social divisions and underlying disparities that had haunted the nation from birth were increasingly laid bare. Of these, racial inequality was perhaps most shameful: African American men, women, and children were forced to live a separate existence from that of their fellow citizens, whether due to de jure segregation in the South or the no less pernicious zoning ordinances that kept black families out of middle-class neighbourhoods in the North.

The fifteen years from the end of the World War II to 1960 were in many ways a dark period of queer history in the United Kingdom. The 1920s and 1930s were relatively relaxed in their attitudes to the gay world. As Adam de Hegedus, writing as Rodney Garland, wrote in his novel The Heart in Exile (1953), ‘the war broke down inhibitions and the element of danger made sex rampant. Public opinion was lax and the understaffed police had many other things on their minds.’

Journalist Royce Kurmelovs has written several business-focused books, including a well-received account of the end of Australia’s iconic Holden cars (The Death of Holden, 2016) and a partly personal analysis of the social costs of ubiquitous indebtedness (Just Money, 2020).

What a difference a decade makes. When the second decade of the millennium opened, the United States was advocating an open door for trade and investment with China. In November 2011, President Barack Obama, in a speech to the Australian Parliament, revealed Washington’s new strategic and economic policy: the Pivot to Asia.

Twenty-five years ago, an international peacekeeping force entered East Timor, delivered it from Indonesian occupation, and placed it under United Nations administration. Known as the International Force East Timor (InterFET), it had 11,000 troops from twenty-three countries and was commanded by an Australian major general. Everything about these events seemed miraculous. East Timor’s independence had long been regarded as impossible; a top adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt observed during World War II that it might eventually achieve self-government, but ‘it would certainly take a thousand years’. Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975 while the latter was in the process of decolonising from Portugal, annexed it the following year, and declared its rule ‘irreversible’.

Aby Warburg (1866-1929) was an influential figure in the academic development of interdisciplinary studies during the early years of the twentieth century, and Hans Hönes’s excellent new biography charts the contributions and contradictions of Warburg’s life and work. Born into an immensely rich banking family in Germany, Warburg nevertheless resisted the expectations associated with his Jewish family background and, despite his grandmother’s hope that he might become a rabbi, opted to carve out for himself a career in humanities scholarship.