This is a marvellous book. Bob Browning, an engineer who went to university after his retirement to study history, has produced an analysis of the 1975 constitutional crisis which has no peer in the now bulky literature written about the dismissal of the Whitlam Government. Part detective story, part law treatise, part an essay in historical reconstruc­tion, the book is carefully crafted, sparely written and absorbing through­out. It is going to have a powerful effect on Australian political thinking, because the current generation of Australian politicians will have to come to terms with it, and because for the next ten years at least, university students will be told to work through it from beginning to end.