Clive Hamilton

Hamilton is an Australian academic who writes public argument rather than scholarship, and the two books come from different decades of it. Affluenza, written with Richard Denniss in 2005, argues that Australians were working harder to buy things that were not making them happier, and supplied enough of that debate's vocabulary to be quoted for years. Requiem for a Species, from 2010, is bleaker: it accepts that dangerous climate change has become unavoidable and asks what follows psychologically from admitting it, which put him at odds with campaigners who hold that despair demobilises people. His later Silent Invasion, on Chinese Communist Party influence in Australia, was dropped by its first publisher over legal risk and drew both serious support and accusations of alarmism.