Peter Craven on Robert Manne's abuse Peter Craven on Professor Robert Manne, twice voted by peers as our leader public intellectual: In practice, [Paul] Kelly's Triumph and Demise is such an authoritative artÂ­iculation of what happened [under the Rudd and the Gillard government] and the subsequent testimony of the players themselves that it was a bit boggling to see the book dismissed with such inflamed outrage by Robert Manne in October's The Monthly.... But I have seen Manne's decline into the most intemperate and fact-challenged polemics that now so distinguishes the far Left. Craven had a box seat: I was editor of Quarterly Essay in 2001 when [Manne] wrote the first one, about the Stolen Generations, and I left three years later at the time of his second essay, about asylum-seekers. Manne, of course, has famously failed to meet my challenge to name even 10 children stolen as he describes. He has repeatedly failed. Craven proceeds to fillet Manne all over again....