Book reviews: Political troglodytes and economic lunatics: The hard right in Australia, by Dominic Kelly, Melbourne, La Trobe University Press, 2019, x + 277 pp., $32.99 (paperback), ISBN 978176064109

In her 1928 novel, Orlando, Virginia Woolf writes that “all extremes of feeling are allied to madness”. Perhaps so, but it is a “madness” of endless fascination, especially in politics. Since the 2016 Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump in the US, the rise of the populism in Europe, and the emergence of the alt-right, historians and political scientists have paid increasing attention to the extremities of the political grid. Borrowing Bob Hawke’s pithy dismissal for its title, Dominic Kelly’s Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics provides a useful history of hard-right advocacy groups and how a small number of culture warriors had a disproportionately large political impact.