5-minute Lowy lunch: Paul Kelly

Paul Kelly's work lends a certain grandeur to our national story — schoolkids of my generation saw Australian history as 'boring', but Kelly makes it feel important. I look forward to seeing whether his new book, The March of Patriots, matches up to his totemic The End of Certainty.

Yesterday's 5-minute Lowy lunch interview came after Paul Kelly had given a sprawling speech about the last decade-and-a-half of Australian foreign policy, first under Keating and then Howard. I began by asking Kelly why, when these two men were so different in so many ways, there is nevertheless a common thread that runs through their foreign policies.