Robert Michael Manne (born 31 October 1947) is an Emeritus Professor of politics and Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He is a leading Australian public intellectual. Background Robert Manne was born in Melbourne to parents who were Jewish refugees from Europe. His earliest political consciousness was shaped by this fact and that both sets of grandparents were victims of The Holocaust. He was educated at the University of Melbourne (1966–69) (BA) (Honours thesis 1969, "George Orwell: Socialist Pamphleteer") and the University of Oxford (BPhil). He joined La Trobe University in Melbourne in its early years. He served there as a professor in politics and culture until retirement in 2012. He is Vice-Chancellor's Fellow and Convenor of the Ideas & Society Program at La Trobe. Since 1983, he has been married to journalist and social philosopher Anne Manne (née Robinson). He has two daughters, including Kate Manne, a philosopher and an associate professor at Cornell University. Contributions Manne's broad interests include 20th-century European politics (including the Holocaust), Communism, and Australian politics. He has undertaken research in areas such as censorship, anti-semitism, asylum seekers and mandatory detention, Australia's involvement in the Iraq War, the Stolen Generations, and the "history wars" of the 1990s. Manne has aligned at various times within the Australian political scene from left to right, then back to left again; he titled a compendium of his political essays Left, Right, Left. Between 1989 and 1997 Manne edited the conservative magazine Quadrant, resigning when his editorial policies diverged from the views of the magazine's management committee. He had originally been appointed based on his previous anti-communist publications and his reputation as a conservative. Some people associated with Quadrant during his editorship believed that he was trying to push the magazine to the left. Since leaving the magazine, Manne has criticised it and the editors who came before—Peter Coleman and Roger Sandall, and after him—P. P. McGuinness and Keith Windschuttle. In 1996 he published The Culture of Forgetting, which explored the controversy surrounding Helen Demidenko's 1994 Miles Franklin Award-winning novel about the Holocaust, The Hand that Signed the Paper. His book was widely discussed and cited. Among Manne's other books are The New Conservatism in Australia (1982), In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right (2001), and Do Not Disturb (2005). He edited the 2003 anthology, Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, as a rebuttal to