In this issue:

 

In “The Defence of David Hicks”, Alfred W McCoy goes behind the scenes of the Hicks legal team, analysing the popularity of Major Michael Mori and investigating the difficulties the team has faced: cultural conflicts, inadequate staffing and preparation – and the dubious workings of the military commissions set up at Guantanamo Bay, which compromised America’s tradition of military justice.

In “Faith in Politics”, Kevin Rudd, the ALP’s shadow minister for foreign affairs, calls for a just Australia. Inspired by the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the twentieth-century German theologian, Rudd argues that Christianity can inform political and social action by speaking the truth and giving a voice to the voiceless.

In “Beyond the Cringe”, Deyan Sudjic compares Australia’s low-key contribution to the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale with the wider state of contemporary Australian architecture – which, he says, is unusually rigorous and self-reflective.

In The Nation Reviewed, Don Watson rails against the widespread and slovenly use of the word “icon” to describe those well-known figures who are said to embody “Aussie values”. There’s also Gideon Haigh on the fierce creatures of the op-ed circus, Ashley Hay on the first non-British director of Kew’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Drusilla Modjeska on the Australian buy-up of Vanuatu, and Kaz Cooke on being “mumsy”.

In Arts & Letters, John Hirst selects the best eleven Australian history books. Eschewing obvious choices, he makes a case for understanding Australia through its fiction and memoirs, as well as through those works classed as history proper. There’s also Guy Rundle on the grotesquery of recent British TV comedy and how it documents a nation’s social decline, Edward Scheer on Barrie Kosky’s epic avant-garde production The Lost Echo, and Robert Forster on the new Bob Dylan album.