The premise of your forthcoming book, Repeat, is that history is sending us a warning – and if we don’t learn from the events of the 1920s and 30s, we risk repeating the disaster of the 1940s. What inspired this idea and compelled you to write this book?

As a trained historian, my mind seems to work historically. It’s something compulsive, which I can’t help. Whenever I see a big political event, my mind goes automatically to a similar event in the past and starts making parallels. I also have a habit of looking at things and trying to visualise what was there in the past. So of course when I saw Donald Trump’s attempted insurrection on 6 January 2021, my mind saw Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 8 November 1923, and when I saw Alexy Navalny’s assassination by Vladimir Putin in February this year, I saw Trotsky’s assassination by Joseph Stalin in 1940. I also believe the history profession has taken a wrong turn and lost its way in the thickets of theory and footnotes and bad academic writing. History is too important for this. People need a clear idea of the past so they can see what might be coming in the future and avoid it. That’s why I say we must all be historians now.

As well as an author, you’ve also made a career as one of Australia’s leading speechwriters. How did you come into that line of work?

Upon returning from Cambridge, no history faculty in the country wanted to employ me, so I became a political adviser for the Labor Party. One of the problems of our political class is they generally can’t write (there are exceptions, but many have had their minds ruined by managerialism), so if you can write you tend to end up the speechwriter. It’s actually the best job in politics – because you are involved in every major discussion and have the task of sharpening the message. And, in practical terms, being a speechwriter is one of the ways a writer can earn a decent living.

The last three books you published with us were fiction. Was it a challenge to pivot to non-fiction with Repeat?

Not at all. I have written non-fiction in the past – An Economy is Not a Society (2015) and Orwell’s Australia (2003) and I love the short non-academic, non-fiction form. And of course my hero is George Orwell who combined the two to express his political beliefs in different ways. I regard myself as essentially a political writer and my novels, which are about fascism, the destruction of the working class and climate change, are as political in intent as my non-fiction. If one thing unites all my books it is probably nostalgia. I’m a big, tragic nostalgic.

If readers will only take one message away from Repeat, what do you hope that message is?

The populists and fascists are coming back. Don’t let them. Don’t give them an inch. Crush them now while we are still stronger than them. And arm Ukraine!

Aside from your own, what’s one book you think that everybody should read?

George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

To learn more about Repeat: A Warning from History and pre-order a copy, click here.