Richard Walsh

For two decades of my life, I worked as a senior executive with first Rupert Murdoch and then Kerry Packer. These were challenging years, not without their hairy moments, but I always felt my best way of retaining any kind of perspective at that time was to conceive of myself as a bit player at the court of a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century monarch

Until the last decade, there has been very little serious scholarly interest in Australian book publishing. Indeed, when I began lecturing in this discipline in 2001, there was no historical or contemporary overview that could be recommended to my students beyond the entry in the Australian Encyclopedia. However, with the recent dramatic growth in Communications courses, and spurred on by projects such as the History of the Book in Australia (HOBA), this situation has suddenly changed. UQP has already published two of the three promised HOBA volumes on the history of Australia’s print culture. Now we have, from the same publisher, a new collection of scholarly articles, which is undoubtedly superior to Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946– 2005 (2006), the HOBA volume that dealt inter alia with contemporary publishing. Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing is less impressionistic and more systematic in its approach.

There is something uncommonly beguiling about a business writer who can insouciantly intersperse his argument with references to Eugene O’Neill and T.S. Eliot. Gideon Haigh is such a man, and the tale he has to tell is wonderfully seasoned by his intelligence and literacy. But that does not make its logic compelling.

Bad Company displays an almost tabloid preoccupation with the excesses of certain charismatic CEOs: particularly, in the local context, Ray Williams of HIH and the Wizards of One. Tel. But to suggest that these fallen idols are typical Australian CEOs is like describing Helen Darville as one of our typical novelists, or Ern Malley as a typical poet.

This book is as beguilingly English as a Fortnum & Mason picnic hamper. Peter Stothard (a former editor of The Times and current editor of the Times Literary Supplement) spent a month inside 10 Downing Street reporting in intimate detail the comings and goings there during the critical days before and after the Coalition of the Willing began its assault on Iraq on March 20 this year. He evokes a life-size doll’s house from which a war is being waged by perplexed adults in suits and jeans, who pick spasmodically at substandard food, fantasise about fitness régimes and support spectacularly unsuccessful soccer teams. The man in charge lives in a flat above this strange enterprise with the rest of his family.