'As well as having a knack for hitting a number of nails on the head, he's a pleasure to read.'

-- Gore Vidal

This brilliant, acerbic, warm-hearted and wickedly hilarious book covers an astonishing range of subjects -- including the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Tampa crisis, the slaughter in East Timor, the 2001 federal election and all recent state elections, travelling in Israel, the deaths of Richard Wherrett, Don Dunstan, Sir Nigel Hawthorne and Phar Lap, conservation campaigns in Tasmania, and the controversial election of President George W. Bush -- and is rich with unflinching close-ups of the well-beloved and hated figures who had helped make the world we are now in.

Bob Ellis has been lately impersonated by Max Gillies and is now a kind of dusty national icon reverenced, affectionately mocked and sometimes disliked by literate Australians of all ages. He brings his experience as playwright, film director, political speechwriter, mob orator, songwriter, novelist, actor, film critic, essayist, historian, poet and 'roving Suetonius' to Goodbye Babylon, a hydra-headed portrait of transmillennial Australia and Labor's exhilarating resurgence in time of global war.

Surely no-one writes as well as Bob Ellis on Australian politics and society. Full of his characteristic irony, sweetness, hilarity, sadness and honourable nostalgia, Goodbye Babylon is for everyone keen to know what actually happened, and why.

Available from Penguin Books, order through local bookshops.