Neal Blewett

Not for the Faint-hearted: A personal reflection on life, politics and purpose by Kevin Rudd

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April 2018, no. 400
Neal Blewett reviews 'Not for the Faint-hearted: A personal reflection on life, politics and purpose' by Kevin Rudd

It has already become a cliché: Kevin Rudd’s memoir, 'Not for the Faint-Hearted', is not for the faint-hearted. More than 600 densely packed pages long, it contains some 230,000 words and over 1,000 footnotes, but by the end of the volume Rudd is yet to be sworn in as the twenty-sixth prime minister of Australia ...

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Evatt: A life by John Murphy

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November 2016, no. 386
Neal Blewett reviews 'Evatt: A life' by John Murphy

John Murphy opens his magisterial study of Herbert Vere Evatt – the fourth major biography of the good doctor – with an essay on the challenge of writing biography in general, and of ...

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The Killing Season Uncut by Sarah Ferguson, with Patricia Drum

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August 2016, no. 383
Neal Blewett reviews 'The Killing Season Uncut' by Sarah Ferguson with Patricia Drum

Books have long provided fodder for films and television. Now films and television series, particularly documentaries, spawn books. The Killing Season Uncut is a ...

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Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes by Richard Davenport-Hines

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December 2015, no. 377
Neal Blewett reviews 'Universal Man' by Richard Davenport-Hines

John Maynard Keynes has not lacked for biographers – about a dozen at last count. His first, his student Roy Harrod, established the framework of the public life, though providing only a sanitised version of the private Keynes. Donald Moggridge wrote the definitive account of the economic man, while Robert Skidelsky, with his three-volume work, John Maynard Ke ...

My Story by Julia Gillard

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December 2014, no. 367
The coup that doomed two Labor prime ministers

Much like her government, Julia Gillard’s memoir resembles the proverbial curate’s egg. Where her passions are involved, as with education (‘Our Children’) or the fair work laws, we are provided with a compelling policy read. Where they are not, as in large slabs of foreign policy, the insightful competes with the pedestrian, enlivened admittedly with her pe ...

Diary of A Foreign Minister by Bob Carr

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June–July 2014, no. 362
Neal Blewett reviews 'Diary of A Foreign Minister' by Bob Carr

‘Dear Dr Blewett, I am writing to you ... concerning your intention to publish the diary you kept during the first Keating Government ... Whether any legal action, criminal or civil, is initiated would be entirely a matter for the Commonwealth government and relevant authorities ... 

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Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832 by Antonia Fraser

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July–August 2013, no. 353
Neal Blewett reviews 'Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832' by Antonia Fraser
O

ver fifty years have passed since I wrote my first tutorial essay in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE), or Modern Greats, as it was known in Oxford. The subject was the Great Reform Bill of 1832, which for the first time in over a century expanded the right to vote and redrew the electoral map of Great Britain ...

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Gough Whitlam: His Time: The Biography, Volume II by Jenny Hocking

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November 2012, no. 346
Gough Whitlam in and out of government

Jenny Hocking concluded the first volume of her Whitlam biography (2008) on the eve of her subject’s electoral victory in December 1972. Gough Whitlam had been the most effective and creative opposition leader in Australian history: since 1967 he had dragged a protesting Labor party into the second half of the twentieth century; provided the party with a contempor ...

Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt, with Timothy Snyder

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June 2012, no. 342

This author, this book, and its composition are all extraordinary. Tony Judt, one of the most distinguished historians of his generation, made his name with studies of French intellectual history, then in 2005 he published his masterwork, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. ...

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After Words: The Post-Prime Ministerial Speeches by P.J. Keating

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February 2012, no. 338

As of writing, Australia has six living ex-prime ministers – not quite a record. Of these, one, of course, is still in parliamentary harness, and may still aspire to the top job. Of the remaining five, all but one have provided us with voluminous accounts of their stewardship ...

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