POWER, POLITICS & PARLIAMENT ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF JOHN R. NETHERCOTE Edited by Henry Ergas and Jonathan Pincus Connor Court Publishing Pty Ltd 2023 ISBN:9781922815163 RRP: (HB) $59.95 Reviewed by Michael Baume "Anonymous in Life, Anonymous in Death: Memoirs and biographies of administrators” was the title when John R Nethercote, the Australian bureaucracy’s renowned historian, [...]
THE YOUNG MENZIES - Success, Failure, Resilience 1894–1942 edited by Zachary Gorman. Melbourne University Press, 2022 ISBN: 9780522879223 RRP: $49.95 (HB) Reviewed by Ross Fitzgerald After a brilliant career at the Melbourne bar in the 1920s and a period as Victoria’s Attorney-General, Sir Robert Gordon Menzies eventually became the most towering federal parliamentarian [...]
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE FIVE EYES: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE INTERNATIONAL SPY NETWORK By Richard Kerbaj. Blink Publishing RRP $34.99 Reviewed by Ross Fitzgerald Recently released in the United Kingdom, Richard Kerbaj’s, The Secret History of The Five Eyes: The untold story of the international spy network is a fascinating account of the Western world's [...]
THE SINS OF G.K. CHESTERTON By Richard Ingrams Publisher: Harbour Books (East) Ltd, August 2021 ISBN: 1905128339 RRP Hardcover: $44.20 Reviewed by Gerard Henderson I grew up in a Catholic family in Melbourne in the 1950s. My mother, a musician undertaking what in those days were sometimes called “home duties”, was a big fan of [...]
EGO – MALCOLM TURNBULL AND THE LIBERAL PARTY’S CIVIL WAR By Aaron Patrick HarperCollins 2022 ISBN: 978 1 4607 6143 4 RRP: $34.99 (PB) Reviewed by Anne Henderson When Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the Liberal/National Coalition scraped home to win the May 2019 federal election in Australia, little could they have seen as [...]
CHINA AFTER MAO: THE RISE OF A SUPERPOWER By Frank Dikotter Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 9781639730513 RRP: $34.99 (pb) Also: The Tragedy of Liberation, Mao’s Great famine and The Cultural Revolution (all published by Bloomsbury from 2010 to 2016). Reviewed by Keith Harvey Frank Dikotter is a remarkable historian of modern China. Dutch born, he [...]
YOUNG BLOOMSBURY – THE GENERATION THAT REIMAGINED LOVE, FREEDOM AND SELF-EXPRESSION By Nino Strachey John Murray 2022 ISBN: 978 1 529 3694 1 RRP: $34.99 (PB) Reviewed by Anne Henderson What today’s pronoun obsessed and gender reassignment Woke groups might make of the bohemian Bloomsbury personalities in Britain’s early twentieth century is anybody’s [...]
HITLER’S GIRL – THE BRITISH ARISTOCRACY AND THE THIRD REICH By Lauren Young HarperCollins 2022 ISBN: 978 0 06 293673-8 RRP: $34.99 (PB) Reviewed by Anne Henderson Sadly for the reputation of a few well known Americans, a lack of understanding of the complexities of the British class system and its aristocracy, much less [...]
