Reading in Community,Reading for Community: A Survey of Book Clubs in Regional Australia

Worries about weakening community are central to assessments of modern Australia, yet it is easy to overlook the everyday ways we “do” and participate in community life. Book clubs are one area of community participation largely ignored by researchers despite the local and national proliferation of such clubs. Surveying twenty-two book groups and ninety-seven book club members, this study investigates the roles that book clubs play in the cultural and community life of a regional area of Tasmania. The results show that book clubs promote regular intellectual engagement and provide for a distinct female sociality that consolidates and creates new social connections and function as everyday “escape attempts” from the obligations of work and family. We suggest that the support and development of local book club programs may have considerable potential as a strategy for Australian governments and communities to foster a sense of community.     

Re-entering the Lists: MI5's Authorized History and the August 1914 Arrests

Abstract

The 2009 Authorized History of MI5 carried a new defence of its August 1914 operation, in which Vernon Kell, its first Director, supposedly scored a coup by capturing all 21 German agents working in Britain. The Authorized History went against the version of events given in my article ‘Entering the Lists’, published by this journal in 2006, and backed up its case with a new arrest list. This article considers that new list, and its supposed origins in an MI5 document from 1931. Once again it demonstrates the impossibility of turning MI5's foundation myth into history, by showing that not only is the account in the Authorized History internally inconsistent, but the arrest list consists of 22 names arbitrarily selected from later case summaries, then wrongly footnoted to an MI5 document which contains a different list of 21 names. Indeed, by claiming authority from the only arrest list known to have been challenged within MI5 itself, the Authorized History merely reinforces the conclusion that Kell fabricated his most famous victory.     

Getting CIA History Right: The Informal Partnership Between Agency Historians and Outside Scholars

The common task of all historians is to endeavour to present history as accurately and objectively as possible despite gaps in the record or a paucity of evidence. Intelligence historians face particular challenges in making sense of what too often is history deliberately shrouded. Staff historians of the Central Intelligence Agency operate mostly in the secret world and yet rely on the fine work of ‘outside’ historians. There is in effect a largely unstated, certainly informal, but absolutely crucial partnership between CIA historians on the ‘inside’ and dedicated scholars on the ‘outside’. It is not too much to say, in fact, that accurate and objective history about the CIA is possible only through this informal partnership.     

Book reviews

Ennio Di Nolfo (ed.), Power in Europe?II. Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy and the Origins of the EEC, 1952-1957. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1992), DM238.

Simon J. Nuttall, European Political Cooperation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 343pp. £30, ISBN 0 19 827318 5.

Michael Smith and Stephen Woolcock, The United States and the European Community in a Transformed World (London: Pinter publishers for Royal Institute for International Affairs, 1993), 120 pp., £22.50 hb, £9.95 pb. ISBN 086187 0972/086187 0980.

Richard H. Ullman, Securing Europe (London: Adamantine Press, 1991), 175pp., £12.95. ISBN 0 7449 0036 0.

Cornelia Navari (ed.), The Condition of States: A Study in International Political Theory (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), 238pp.

Francine Friedman, (comp. and ed.) Yugoslavia: A Comprehensive English-Language Bibliography (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1993), xv + 547 pp., indices, US$ 120.

Richard Dean Burns (ed.), Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993), three vols., 1692 pp. inch index, US$280, ISBN 0 684 19281 0.     

Patents holders are not protected from US Government infringement by the Fifth Amendment

In a patent infringement action against the government, theUnited States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit interpreted28 USC section 1498 as rendering the government liable for theinfringement of a method patent only when every step of theclaimed method is practised in the United States and furtherheld that a plaintiff cannot allege patent infringement againstthe government as a Fifth Amendment taking.     

Strategic Coordination and the Law

We re-examine the relationship between coordination, legal sanctions, and free-riding in light of the recent controversy regarding the applicability of the coordination problem paradigm of law-making. We argue that legal sanctions can help solve coordination problems by eliminating socially suboptimal equilibrium outcomes. Once coordination has taken place, however, free-riding can not lead to the breakdown of coordination outcomes, even if sanctions may still be effective at increasing the equity of such outcomes. Finally, we argue that it is the choice of a legal or constitutional system rather than the choice of law that is paradigmatic of the coordination problem. This view requires a re-assessment of the normative status of sanctions attached to individual laws. We thank Catherine Hafer and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.     

Wide Awake With Anxiety

The Poetry of Petrarch, translated by David Young
Petrarch's Guide to the Holy Land: Itinerary to the Sepulcher of Our Lord Jesus Christ, with an introductory essay, translation, and notes by Theodore J. Cachey, Jr
My Secret Book, by Francis Petrarch, translated by J. G. Nichols, foreword by Germaine Greer