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Aug 29, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Patrick Mullins |Arts Highlights
It is easy to imagine book-buyers nodding with approval at the subtitle of this biography: ‘The making of a larrikin’. With ‘larrikin’ today applied to knockabout young men who are irreverent and mischievous but genuinely good-hearted, Bob Hawke seems a quintessential example.
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Jul 24, 2024 | 
insidestory.org.au | Patrick Mullins
In 1985, nearly seventy years after the end of the first world war, authorities at Westminster Cathedral unveiled a plaque in Poets’ Corner commemorating sixteen poets who had fought in that conflict. Among the most famous of the group were Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves (the only one still living), Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen. It was Owen who supplied the inscription that encircles the names: “My subject is war, and the pity of war.
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Apr 21, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Patrick Mullins |Arts Highlights
Bill Hayden might today be recalled as the unluckiest man in politics: Bob Hawke replaced him as Labor leader on the same day that Malcolm Fraser called an election that Hayden, after years of rebuilding the Labor Party after the Whitlam years, was well positioned to win.
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Apr 21, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Patrick Mullins |Arts Highlights
Bill Hayden might today be recalled as the unluckiest man in politics: Bob Hawke replaced him as Labor leader on the same day that Malcolm Fraser called an election that Hayden, after years of rebuilding the Labor Party after the Whitlam years, was well positioned to win.
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Mar 26, 2024 | 
insidestory.org.au | Nicholas Shakespeare |Harvill Secker |Patrick Mullins
Shakespeare famously concluded that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But what about fictional characters? Would Arthur Conan Doyle’s Baker Street detective have won as many fans if Conan Doyle had trusted his main character’s original name, Sherrinford Hope? Would the world-in-the-balance quest that underpins The Lord of the Rings have been taken as seriously had J.R.R. Tolkien stuck with Bingo Bolger-Baggins?
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Feb 22, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Patrick Mullins |Arts Highlights
Bernard Cohen’s satirical novel The Antibiography of Robert F. Menzies (2013) begins shortly before the 1996 election with the titular character stepping ‘through a breach in time’ to help his successors win government. But while John Howard’s double-breasted jackets and headland speeches initially soothe this ‘large and benevolent plasmic entity’, the revenant Menzies soon becomes frustrated by the emptiness and the clichés of 1990s politics.
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Nov 19, 2023 | 
insidestory.org.au | Adam Sisman |Patrick Mullins
Adam Sisman is an attentive reader. As he demonstrated in biographies of the historian A.J.P. Taylor (1994), poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2006), and academic Hugh Trevor-Roper (2010), he is alive to detail, implications and subtleties. As a scholar of biography, moreover — as manifesting in his prize-winning Boswell’s Presumptuous Task (2000) — he knows the dynamics and tensions that make the form so energising to read and work in.
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Sep 24, 2023 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Patrick Mullins
When the first season of Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom premièred in Australia in 2012, Foxtel had its own onscreen news talent cut a series of promos. A bevy of ageless news anchors – all dense hairdos and blazing white teeth – talked admiringly of how the series portrayed their profession. Journalism, in their telling, was fast-paced, often self-righteous, occasionally fallible, but ultimately always a noble occupation that served the public’s interest.
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Jun 26, 2023 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Patrick Mullins
MediaThe ploys of media moguls and politiciansMedia Monsters: The transformation of Australia’s newspaper empires by Sally YoungUNSW Press, $49.99 pb, 576 ppMediaThe ploys of media moguls and politiciansIn 1968, Rupert Murdoch was one step from acquiring his first international media holding, in the British tabloid The News of the World.
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May 23, 2023 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Patrick Mullins
In June 1971, Sir John Bunting, secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, observed that new prime minister Billy McMahon was ‘the most political of all politicians’: demanding, difficult, always reacting to new, feverish urgencies. The result, according to Bunting, was constant crisis.
