The connection between Australia and Irving Kristol, “the godfather of neoconservatism”, is not obvious. Having politely but firmly rejected repeated invitations to do so, he has never visited the country. He has never written about it. Australia—along with a great deal of the rest of the Earth’s surface, including Asia, Latin America, Africa and Canada—does not claim his serious attention, which is reserved for what goes on in the United States, Europe and Israel. I am the only Australian who has had a sustained working relationship with Irving, but he has shown a warmer interest in my original Welshness than in my acquired Australianness. (Not that Wales has a vital grip on his imagination either. True, he and Bea [the distinguished historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol’s wife] did visit the country once, when they were based in London in the 1950s. But when they got there, they managed to stay in the least Welsh place it was possible to find in the principality: the eccentric Italianate “village” created by Clough Williams-Ellis at Portmeirion, a location where one was more likely to meet Noel Coward than the Reverend Eli Jenkins.)