James McAuley rose to national prominence as a poet and polemicist after his conversion to Catholicism in 1952. From the mid 1950s, when he assumed the founding editorship of Quadrant, the magazine of the Australian Congress for Cultural Freedom, until his death in 1976, he neither gave nor asked for quarter in the political and religious arenas. Christ and the Church Fathers who had wielded the whip against adversaries provided him with precedents, or as he remarked of one of his fictional characters in a late interview: "my choice in situations is not likely to be that of Quiros. I think it is necessary to embark on violence." Intemperance marked many of his statements during the Vietnam War. Disciplines to which he had devoted his best years were savaged as "those rickety rackety subjects which like to call themselves human or social sciences." Australian universities were pilloried for having "contributed...