Bob Ellis is first and foremost a journalist, but his literary skills have also led him much further afield as a playwright, film maker, speech writer, and, horror of all horrors - even as an actor! More than anything, he's a passionate Labor man through and through, right down to his working class boot straps. He moves amongst the upper echelons of the political world, and yet there's something about his rumpled and shambolic appearance that's as familiar and comfortable as your favourite old lounge room chair.

In the wake of the Bali bombings, Ellis called for John Howard to be sacked as Prime Minister. This is a subject on which he is never neutral. His latest book on politics is called Goodbye Babylon because he equates life under a twice re-elected Howard government with a Biblical life of exile in unholy Babylon or Egypt. I can't disagree - especially as it is now a thrice re-elected Howard government. They say people get the governments they deserve - but I don't deserve this.

Goodbye Babylon features a flood of colourful flashbacks in which Ellis dwells on a dozen or so elections in Australia, Britain and Florida in the apocalyptic years spanning the millennium. 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. ( )