There are echoes here of  Tony Judt’s later writing, particularly The Memory Chalet (2010). Diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, the great European historian chronicled his gradual physical incapacitation – what he called his ‘slow imprisonment without parole’. With this abrupt confrontation with mortality, Judt, an intellectual driven by the biggest political questions of his day, was drawn inwards and backwards, to the world of postwar youth; remembering the small personal details that came together to make a big public life.

While Manne’s condition might be less debilitating – Judt spent the last years of his life paralysed from the neck down, with almost no power of movement – the change produced a similar, if tentative, shift in focus. How could it not? On one level, though, it’s the same old Manne. The essay explains the timeline of diagnosis, treatment, and recovery in dispassionate detail; so too the practicalities of life after a laryngectomy. Although initially dreading hospitalisation, Manne finds it a sociological experience, and he expresses his growing appreciation for these ‘secular cathedrals’ – public institutions built to heal and console the sick.

At the same time, the essay offers a different, more personal side of the man. If he ever truly contemplated choosing death over a voiceless life, the trump card was obviously his wife Anne Manne, journalist and philosopher. The author writes beautifully of ‘what the marriage of two bodies and minds can mean’, particularly under the strain of illness. Movingly, he records his last original voice message to the ‘love of his life’, before being rolled into surgery. When he finally returns to their home in Melbourne, mobbed by their cats, the relief is overwhelming. On New Year’s Eve, the two watch It’s a Wonderful Life together, tears in their eyes.

The title essay is the collection’s newest, and might indicate a new turn in Manne’s writing. The older essays, however, follow a more conventional form. While lacking the narrative arc of a book like Left, Right, Left (2005) – which mapped his shift from a youthful social democrat to a middle-aged anti-communist, to an older critic of neoliberalism and reactionary culture warriors – they also confront some of the defining debates facing human society, though now from a more orthodox left perspective.

The biggest of these issues, and the book’s most urgent, is climate change. After the Berlin Wall fell, Manne said he felt ‘liberated’, able to focus his energy on new questions. In some ways, climate change feels like a substitute for that era’s existential battle over authoritarianism. It is certainly as apocalyptic, as Manne makes clear:

There is nothing in history even remotely as momentous as what humankind is now doing with full knowledge of the facts – gradually destroying the habitability of large parts of the Earth for humans and other species by burning fossil fuels in ever increasing quantities to meet our ever increasing energy needs.

Here, Manne’s forensic style is compelling. The evidence is so crushing and neatly presented that, in good faith, it feels wilfully dishonest to accept any other conclusion: that the world is warming, that current policies are completely insufficient to stop it, that society is refusing to acknowledge the structural changes it will require, and that our blindness is being deliberately promoted by a corporate campaign of denialism.

Robert ManneBut where does this leave us? To read Manne’s climate essays is to go through a series of emotional stages: first rage, then impotence, and finally apathy. The problem is so monumental, the forces stacked against it so powerful, that the whole thing starts to feel futile. Manne hints at potential responses, but clearly doesn’t put much faith in them.

A similar sentiment shadows his essays on the media. In Manne’s depiction, The Australian is truly the ‘country’s most important newspaper’ – crusading, conservative and responsible for a trail of progressive failures. Again, no one could accuse Manne of being glib. Evidence, backed in by the truckload, traces the paper’s coverage of the Stolen Generations, climate science, and the invasion of Iraq.

The risk here, however, is falling into a kind of fatalism. By focusing so overwhelmingly on the world of public ideas – newspaper columns, magazine essays, broadcast debates – Manne’s approach can sometimes ignore the other, more active side of politics. For one, The Australian has not won all of its recent battles. The paper’s campaign against same sex marriage failed spectacularly. As things stand, its long fight for free market capitalism, and its opposition to economic intervention, look similarly vulnerable. Political decisions respond to institutions and social movements as much as they do opinion pieces.

In 2012, Manne interviewed Malcolm Turnbull, at that stage a mere shadow minister for communications. Published in The Monthly, the profile makes Manne’s strengths and limitations especially clear. Concerned with big ideas, from the rise of China to the nature of liberalism, we get a fascinating tour of Turnbull’s mind. Afterwards, Manne concludes that Malcolm is the ‘heir to the Deakinite tradition in the Liberal Party’.

Revisiting the topic five years later, Manne now ‘realises what a fool I was’. Deakin did not rise again, as Manne had hoped. Instead, we have something far more common: the leader of a conservative party trying to survive, making the compromises deemed necessary to endure and govern. Manne might look to character for explanation, but the answer is deeper than that. By elevating individuals and ideas above all else – and relegating politics as it exists in the world, among institutions and movements and messy groups of people – he missed half the story, and the main one at that.