Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Light and Shadow: Memoirs of a spy’s son by Mark Colvin

by
March 2017, no. 389

Light and Shadow: Memoirs of a spy’s son by Mark Colvin

Melbourne University Press, $32.99 pb, 304 pp, 9780522870893

Light and Shadow: Memoirs of a spy’s son by Mark Colvin

by
March 2017, no. 389

Mark Colvin’s fine memoir – of a journalist’s life and as a spy’s son – was completed before the Macquarie Dictionary chose ‘fake news’ as its word of the year, and the OED and Merriam-Webster opted for ‘post truth’ and ‘surreal’. In July 2016, as Colvin was writing his acknowledgments chapter, Donald Trump was being nominated as the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States. Colvin does not mention Trump’s name. But his entire book – a principled insider’s history of the craft of journalism, of Cold War politics, espionage, and the pivotal political events of the twentieth and early twenty-first century – is a counter-instance to ‘fake news’ and the hyperventilating culture which spawns it. It is also a bracing reminder that the fourth estate – in its now myriad manifestations – remains the necessary counterweight to the abuse of power and to oligarchic or autocratic rule.

As I was rereading Colvin in New Jersey in January, six days before the presidential inauguration, Carl Bernstein appeared on television in his role as a contributing editor to CNN’s new investigative unit. Asked how journalists should conduct themselves in the new political order, the Watergate veteran replied: ‘By getting the best obtainable version of the truth, which is our mission.’  When asked for his response to Trump, Bernstein said simply ‘I don’t know enough. I’d have to do the reporting.’

Morag Fraser reviews 'Light and Shadow: Memoirs of a spy's son' by Mark Colvin

Light and Shadow: Memoirs of a spy’s son

by Mark Colvin

Melbourne University Press, $32.99 pb, 304 pp, 9780522870893

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.