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You might think a photo of a middle-aged royal with his arm around a sex-trafficked teenage girl would be his downfall. But it has taken a book to deliver the coup de grâce.
The news that Andrew Mountbatten Windsor has been stripped of his title and evicted from his home comes a little over a week after the posthumous release of Virginia Giuffre’s tell-all memoir Nobody’s Girl. An account of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation from the perspective of its most prominent victim, Nobody's Girl is almost certainly the most consequential book to be published this year. As Kate Cantrell writes, the sexual abuse Giuffre alleges was truly horrific. The Epstein scandal is far from over and one hopes that Mr Mountbatten Windsor will not be the last person held to account.
In this week’s Friday essay, veteran broadcaster Jon Faine issues an urgent call to action on social cohesion. Our democratic backsliding is not a coincidence, nor is it homegrown, he argues. Foreign agents are attacking Australian targets to unsettle and stress us, and while Australian society is resilient, we all have a part to play.
Our fiction reviews this week consider the latest novels by award-winning authors Kiran Desai and Sofie Laguna. As is our wont here at Books + Ideas, we also love to revisit perennially relevant works from the past. Chris Fleming’s essay on Max Weber’s classic sociological study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is not only a lucid and witty summary of an influential book, but essential reading for anyone who has ever stopped to wonder why so many people feel compelled to work themselves into the ground.
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James Ley
Deputy Books + Ideas Editor
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Kate Cantrell, University of Southern Queensland
Nobody’s Girl is Virginia Giuffre’s inside account of the two years she spent as a ‘sex slave’ working for Jeffrey Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
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Jon Faine, The University of Melbourne
Australia has been, and continues to be, remarkably resilient. But the fragile machinery of democracy needs some long overdue maintenance.
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Chris Fleming, Western Sydney University
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is neither a history of economics, nor a religious history. It borrows from both, but is stranger than either.
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Vijay Mishra, Murdoch University
Is Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny the great American–Indian novel?
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Fiona Morrison, UNSW Sydney
The Underworld showcases Sofie Laguna’s tremendous ability as a writer. But it’s hard not to want the novel to risk more and ask more.
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Pamela O'Neill, University of Sydney
For the last few millennia, the changing of the seasons has been marked by Celtic peoples with festivals. And some of the costumes were genuinely terrifying.
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More great reading
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Nicola Bowring, Nottingham Trent University
Sources as old as Pliny the Younger, the ancient Roman lawyer and writer, tell stories of houses that are haunted.
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Chloe Ward, Queen Mary University of London; Åsa Harvard Maare, Malmö University; Catherine Spooner, Lancaster University; Daisy Dixon, Cardiff University; Frances Fowle, University of Edinburgh; Karl Bell, University of Portsmouth; Pippa Catterall, University of Westminster
From gruesome portraits to creepy critters, these are the paintings that have stayed with our experts long after their first glimpse.
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Eli Alshanetsky, Temple University
Students – and all manner of professionals – are tempted to outsource their thinking to AI, which threatens to undermine learning and credibility. A philosophy professor offers a solution.
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James Paterson, Monash University
In extremist circles, the idea of retreating to the land has been repurposed into a political strategy.
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