Rooming with Lillian. "Lillian Roxon: Mother of Rock" by Robert Milliken. [review]

Martin Amis's encapsulation of biography is that it should convey a sense of what it would be like to spend some time alone in a room with the subject. Robert Milliken begins his story of Australian journalist and rock music taxonomist Lillian Roxon by revealing that he once went one better: thirty years ago, as a rising reporter in London, he not only met Roxon at a boutique hotel in Notting Hill but jawboned with her at length. That is to say, she talked and he listened.Australia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori

Postcards from Mark. "Eddie Gilbert: The True Story of an Aboriginal Cricketing Legend", by Mike Coleman and Ken Edwards and "Mark Waugh: The Biography", by James Knight. [review]

Browsers will probably find these chronicles of Eddie Gilbert and Mark Waugh snuggled close together in bookshops . Both, after all, are biographies of Australian cricketers, written by journalists, and published by firms with strong sporting backlists. But their proximity will be misleading. Cricket contains few less similar careers, and has generated few more different narrative styles. Indeed, reading them consecutively is to appreciate how stealthily our understanding of ‘biography’ has been elasticised

A matter of opinion. by Gideon Haigh

Political parties and governments have relied on opinion pollsters to guide their policies and strategies, and often to excuse inaction

Doctorates in Mateyness. "HIH: This Inside Story of Australia's Biggest Corporate Collapse" by Mark Westfield. [review]

If you like business bodice-rippers, these are blissful days. After the host of books that emerged from the dotcom Götterdämmerung, another wave of cautionary tales has hit the shelves. I reached for Mark Westfield’s "HIH" after reading my third book about Enron, Mimi Swartz’s "Power Failure", and was struck at once by a casual coincidence: that both Enron's Ken Lay and HIH’s Ray Williams insisted on being referred to as 'Doctor'. In Lay's case, this was on account of his PhD in economics. Williams laid rather flimsier claim to his honorific, after Monash University rewarded him for various endowments with an honorary doctorate in laws in 1999.Australia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori

Three Cheers for Dickey. "Finding Common Interest: The Story of Dick Dusseldorp and Lend Lease" by Lindie Clark. [review]

Those concerned with corporate life have a good deal to gain from "Finding a Common Interest". Dusseldorp is a rich and provocative subject, Clark an attentive and assiduous student. 'Corporate social responsibility', a voguish subject, is thicker on rhetoric than relevance at present: Clark’s book shows it in action.Australia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori

It’s not cricket!

"An Author event presented by The Friends of the University of Adelaide Library, 19 April 2012, Ira Raymond Room, Barr Smith Library." Recorded at the University of Adelaide, 19 April 2012.Gideon Haig

Elititis. "The Twilight of the Élites" by David Flint. [review]

Accepted on its own terms, "The Twilight of the Élites" is just fine: a readable digest of various strands in current conservative thought, with some parts of which I disagree violently, to other parts of which I am far from antagonistic. It presents a simplistic opposition between ‘élite’ and ‘traditional’ thought without explaining how social conservatism found itself a bedfellow with economic extremism, but that is probably because it is less an effort at persuasion than solace for the already converted. It’s not an unduly self-important book, and is leavened with a droll sense of humour.Australia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori

Straight Reporting. "The Man Who Died Twice: The Life and Adventures of Morrison of Peking" by Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin. [review]

This article is a review of "The Man Who Died Twice: The Life and Adventures of Morrison of Peking" by Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin. George Ernest 'Chinese' Morrison (1862-192) was a photojournalist and well-known authority on China.Australia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori

Labor's Grand Emotional Refugee. "Keeper of the Faith: A Biography of Jim Cairns", by Paul Strangio. [review]

Partly, Strangio's book is burdened by not being a book. It is a Ph.D. It has been edited to a degree but, frankly, should have been completely rewritten. "Keeper of the Faith" is not the dreariest Ph.D redux I've read, perhaps because I have always found its subject interesting. But it is, frankly, often as not, a lifeless and repetitive reading experience. The phrase 'agent of social change', or some minor variation on it, must be repeated a thousand times. The obvious, especially where it concerns Cairns's ambivalence about organised democracy, is often laboured to death. The book conveys little sense of what Cairns is like to be with or to observe, of his personal tastes, of his opinions beyond politics, or even if he has any. The book scarcely contains any anecdotes, the stuff of life in biography. Instead, there are endless slabs of quotes from press reports. One of the very few descriptive comments concerns Cairns's 'trademark parliamentary style', which was 'an impassive monotone, his face expressionless': it could describe Strangio's utterly wooden prose

The Nelson touch: the new censorship

The Minister, the ARC and rejected grants, Gideon Haigh looks at the new censorship of research funding. Published in The Monthl