Still, a Kristol–Australian connection has existed for the past four decades, and it has had a significant effect on Australia’s intellectual and cultural life. It should surprise no one that it has to do with magazines. Irving’s working life has centred on magazines—creating them, publishing and raising money for them, editing them, and writing for them. A strong belief in their efficacy as instruments for furthering a cause and propagating a position is almost certainly the only belief that he has shared with the late Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In Irving’s own writing, the polemical magazine essay has been his weapon of choice, and he has become one of the acknowledged masters of the form in our time.