In exploring Australia's relations with the world, he argues persuasively that Australia was more open to the rest of the world in the nineteenth century than it was during much of the twentieth. His other three lectures are less internally coherent, but full of ideas and evocative vignettes. There is a good exploration of how bitter sectarianism was managed so that hostility stopped short of bloodshed. While we accept the bourgeois virtue of pleasure in moderation, we are worried by excess. The size and fashion police still lurk, creatively devising new rationales for stretching guilt to pleasure.
Tolerance is still apt to be conditioned on tolerability.
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