Biography

Harold Adrian Russell (Kim) Philby was the Third Man of the notorious Cambridge spy network set up in the 1930s and partially unmasked in the early 1950s, when Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to Moscow. He had been in British intelligence (MI6) since the beginning of the war, but had been working for Soviet intelligence for some years before that. A high-flyer, charming and sociable, he rose rapidly as an officer in the British service and was even tipped to be the next head of MI6. After narrowly surviving the Burgess–Maclean fallout, he ended up in Beirut in the early 1960s, working as a freelance journalist for the Observer and the Economist and an agent for MI6 on the side. Son of a famous and eccentric Arabist, St John Philby, his Middle East coverage struck an old friend, Flora Solomon, as anti-Israel, and in criticising it to her old friend Victor Rothschild she mentioned that back in their youth in the 1930s he had tried to recruit her as a communist spy. Lord Rothschild passed that on to MI5, which had had it in for Philby for years, and in the new round of investigation, Philby’s own bosses in MI6 were convinced. An old friend, MI6’s Nicholas Elliott, confronted him in 1963 and obtained a partial confession, but then inexplicably left Beirut and allowed Philby to flee, courtesy of his Soviet handlers.

Usually the subject’s death signals the end of a biography, but for Dylan Jones it is the starting point. Three decades after his death in 1977, Elvis Presley has proven even more ubiquitous, and lucrative, than he was in life. When he died – with the official cause listed as heart failure, but a vast cocktail of drugs playing an undeniable role – his manager, ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, declared, ‘Why, I’ll go right on managing him.’ And from there Parker helped set the template for a superstar entertainer’s posthumous success.

But that’s not all that Jones, who is Editor of GQ, is interested in here. In truth, it can be difficult to pin down just what he is trying to add to the oversaturated conversation about Presley. Elvis Has Left the Building bears the tagline ‘The extraordinary story of how the rock star who changed everything lives on’, yet Jones takes a more roundabout approach in this book. Jones is a sharp and affable writer, but the book has little in the way of sustained focus. He flits between various themes and anecdotes, and even dips in and out of autobiography.

How a writer bears witness to his age is necessarily the expression of many things, not least the possibly quite peculiar nature of an author’s life. Literary works often emerge from complex upbringings, from periods of youthful isolation spent reading and writing. More still seem to have been written as a result of the fraught relationships that befall authors, perhaps because authors so often view their relationships with a degree of creative and critical distance. And yet, if a writer’s output evidences an unusual life, it also witnesses broader questions being asked by a community as a whole. At some level, even the most remarkable figures are typical of their age, and reflections of it. By the close of Paul Binding’s study of the life and works of Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75), we are reminded that extraordinary feats of originality and imagination are often the result of how unique minds enter wider discourses.

Disdaining the opening moves traditionally associated with literary biography – the expected orderly progress through ancestry, parentage, birth, schooling, juvenilia – John Drury’s masterly new account of the life and poetry of George Herbert begins instead with the poem that Drury sees as Herbert’s finest work, written in mid-career, ‘Love (III)’. Herbert designed this poem as the culminating piece in the collection upon which his poetic reputation would come ultimately to rest, The Temple (1633).

Wilhelm II, German Kaiser and King of Prussia, may be a shadowy figure for Australian readers, better known as the butt of funny-scary caricatures in British World War I propaganda or of black humour in popular soldiers’ songs, than as a political player in his own right. He remains enigmatic even for scholars. Some hand him the burden of responsibility for World War I, despite the immediate trigger being the military standoff between two other states altogether, Austro-Hungary and Serbia. Others see him as an incompetent figurehead who merely rubberstamped the territorial ambitions of the German military.

Hamish McDonald has for more than thirty years written about foreign affairs and defence in Asia for publications such as the Sydney Morning Herald, Far Eastern Economic Review, and, more recently, as the world editor for the Saturday Paper. His writings on Indonesian politics and Australian complacency over the Balibo controversy have been more likely to put him in the firing line than on the bestseller’s list in Jakarta’s bookshops, but his tenacity and journalistic skills place him among Australia’s finest. In a departure from his usual subject matter, McDonald has shone a spotlight on Japan’s historical past in the form of a memoir. A War of Words owes its origins to a chance encounter while he was on assignment in Tokyo when the Japanese economic bubble was at its peak. After a fellow journalist gave him a box of papers that included photographs and an anecdotal manuscript of the life and adventures of one Charles Bavier, McDonald spent the better part of three decades piecing together the details of Bavier’s colourful life. Besides being an excellent tale, The War of Words represents an enlightening chapter in the history of both Japan and its ever-changing relationship with Australia.

When I was commissioned to write this review, I assumed that this book would be a conventional political biography. I looked forward to reading about Dunstan’s career as premier of South Australia (1967–68 and 1970–79), as his record of achievements showed that our states and territories have the potential to be powerful players in social and cultural reform. However, the focus of Dino Hodge’s intriguing book is Dunstan the man, with an emphasis on the way in which his personal beliefs and ambiguous sexuality influenced his political life and legacy. Don Dunstan, Intimacy and Liberty makes a solid contribution to our understanding of Dunstan and the blurring of his private and public life, fanned partly by the media, but also, sometimes inadvertently, by the man himself.

He painted Kate Moss naked. The Kray twins threatened to cut off his painting hand over bad gambling debts. He was officially recognised as father to fourteen children by numerous partners, but the unofficial tally could be as high as forty (three were born to different mothers within a few months). He is Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund Freud, born in Berlin on 8 December 1922. All of his gambling disasters came from using his ‘lucky’ birth number, eight. Fittingly, he died at the age of eighty-eight in 2011.

I was a part-time pilgrim on John Eliot Gardiner’s extraordinary year-long journey, from Christmas 1999 to New Year’s Eve 2000, when he took Johann Sebastian Bach on the road. Gardiner’s Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, with his fifteen-member Monteverdi Choir and the twenty instrumentalists of the English Baroque Soloists, performed in Britain, Europe, and the United States all of JSB’s 198 surviving sacred cantatas on the liturgically appropriate days for which they were composed.

Never heard of him – that’s the most common reaction when I mention Gerry Glaskin. Some Western Australians remember him, as they should: he was born and spent his last years there. Yet in between he was a bestselling novelist in the 1950s and 1960s. He was translated into French, German, Swedish, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Danish, and Norwegian. Doubleday commissioned him to write a book about northern Australia. He was also a prolific short story writer, with two published collections. All of this is documented in the appendix and reference list of Dare Me! So how and why has Glaskin been erased from the Australian literary consciousness?