by Akina Hansen | Sep 23, 2022 | Biography & True Stories, Featured Reviews (Homepage), Good Reading Magazine, Latest Reviews, Uncategorized |
Andrew Morton has published popular biographies of Royals and non-Royals, including Diana, Princess of Wales; Prince Andrew of York; Monica Lewinsky; and Tom Cruise. He has now turned his considerable ability to assess the facts and fake news that has surrounded our former sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II. What comes through in this biography is the respect he has for Queen Elizabeth and his admiration for the way she’d tackled problems arising from ‘an irascible husband, an extravagant mother, a querulous heir, and a shamed second son’.
Elizabeth was 25 when she became Queen. Over the 70 years plus she spent as sovereign, she ‘made more small talk than any other monarch in history’.
When very young, she listened gravely to ‘Grandpa England’ (King George V) as he extolled the virtues of duty, decency and hard work. Her mother taught the future Queen to be kind, courteous and to appreciate the benefits of Christian values. Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, believed a decent character, a moral compass and a sensitive awareness of the needs of others were as important, if not more so, than intellectual endeavours.
Princess Elizabeth was in her early teens when she fell for Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark. Despite her mother favouring a member of the English aristocracy, namely Hugh Fitzroy – later the 11th Duke of Grafton – Elizabeth was determined to marry her naval officer.
It was thought Philip would have difficulty accepting the junior role in a marital partnership. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands cautioned the young prince to think hard before ‘entering the Royal cage’. Philip did have problems accepting the restrictions for quite a while. Morton mentions some of the rumours that circulated involving the prince and his equerry, Australian Mike Parker, during their world tours but found no confirmation that any of them were true.
Political crises are the highlights of the biography: the Profumo scandal; Anthony Blunt, long-serving Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, being exposed as a Soviet spy; and the appointment of a new prime minister after Harold Macmillan retired.
Family crises forced Her Majesty to take a welcome break from the drudgery of the interminable arrival of red boxes and the reading of official papers: Princess Margaret wishing to marry her divorced equerry, Group Captain Peter Townsend; the publicity surrounding Prince Charles and his long-term mistress; Princess Margaret again and Roddy Llewelyn; and the death of Princess Diana, the most emotional part of this biography.
After the retirement of the more elderly courtiers, and especially after the death of the Queen’s mother, progressive changes happened more frequently. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother was no longer around to remind Elizabeth of precedent and tradition.
One action of the Queen that made the staff anxious was her refusal to wear protective headwear when she rode her horses around Windsor Great Park. There’s a quote in the book: the only thing standing between Prince Charles and his destiny is a Hermės scarf.
The biography is thoroughly researched with many end-notes detailing where we can check the information on which Morton has relied to form the opinions expressed. For royalty tragics, this is a must-read. For the rest of us, it’s interesting, well-written and entertaining.
Reviewed by Clive Hodges
by Jenni Leigh | Aug 17, 2022 | Biography & True Stories, Good Reading Magazine, Latest Reviews, Non-Fiction |
In 1940 Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, approved the creation of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Its job was to coordinate the infiltration of secret agents to assist local clandestine activity against the Axis powers in territories across Europe and beyond. Different sections looked after different areas. F section handled the 480 agents sent into France; 39 were women. Twenty-five survived the war.
Mission France tells the stories of the 39 women: their recruitment; their training; their work in the field; and what happened to the 12 who went missing, presumed dead. Part of the potential agents’ training was done in requisitioned manor houses with extensive grounds. It became a standing joke among the trainees that SOE actually stood for Stately ’Omes of England.
All the women dropped behind enemy lines were extraordinary. At least two were pregnant when they left England and gave birth in France. Agents captured were considered spies by the enemy … imprisoned, interrogated, tortured and invariably executed. They showed enormous courage. Three women received the George Cross, two the George Medal.
After 8 May 1945 (Victory in Europe Day), SOE personnel still in the field or liberated from imprisonment began to make their way home. Just as the transition to becoming skilled SOE agents had taken time and patience, so did the reverse process. Many just wanted to disappear to lead a quieter life. Others agreed that a film could be made of their exploits and some allowed books to be published. One died of cancer two years after the war ended; another was murdered; and a third was killed in a scuba diving accident.
The research undertaken by the author is commendable. She deals compassionately with each of the 39 women and many of those working behind the scenes. Kate Vigurs has written a book that’s compelling, enlightening and readable.
Reviewed by Clive Hodges
by Jenni Leigh | Aug 17, 2022 | Good Reading Magazine, Latest Reviews, Non-Fiction |
We all know that politicians, regulators, and the captains of industries in transport, property development, banking, unions, mining, and so forth, all swap places on an endless carousel, looking after their former colleagues with favourable policies and political donations or promises of senior positions.
Economics academics Murray and Frijters call such a phenomenon ‘grey gifts’. They explain how, although corrupt, it’s not technically illegal and is notoriously hard to police or restrict. The dual aim of their book Rigged is to show not just that it happens, but that all that top-end-of-town gift-giving comes at the expense of the rest of us.
Originally self-published in 2017 as Game of Mates, Rigged updates and finesses some of the research. Murray and Frijters frame their book around characters they call ‘James’ (the elite) and ‘Sam’ (the rest of us), making constant references to how the James look after each other while the Sams pay for it. This is obviously intended to humanise an otherwise complicated economic treatise and make it accessible, although I’m not sure this works.
The research and their opinions about it (including solutions they think will help reverse the quagmire) are savvy and seem workable. But it’s hard not to be cynical – when the entire class that holds the reins in business and politics stand to lose out, who’s ever going to back such reforms?
Reviewed by Drew Turney
by Jenni Leigh | Aug 17, 2022 | Biography & True Stories, Good Reading Magazine, Latest Reviews, Non-Fiction |
It was in 1992, on the 50th anniversary of the New Guinea campaign in World War II, that then Prime Minister, Paul Keating, gave a speech at Kokoda in which he said, ‘It was here that young Australian men fought for the first time against the prospect of invasion of their country … the first and only time we fought against an enemy to prevent invasion of Australia and to secure the way of life we had built for ourselves …’
On reading The Digger of Kokoda it is clear the sentiments the Prime Minister expressed that day were very much the same that had motivated a young man named Reg Chard to put his life on hold to join the Australian Army in late 1941.
At 98, Reg Chard is now one of the last surviving diggers of Kokoda and the subject of Daniel Lane’s lively biography. Written as a first-person narrative, The Digger of Kokoda is a straightforward and refreshingly honest account of one young man’s wartime experiences and the key events that shaped his life before, during and after the war.
Born in 1923, the son of a twice-wounded World War I veteran, young Reg grew up in a large family in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Marrickville. His memories of what was often a hard scrabble upbringing, particularly during the years of the Great Depression, make for fascinating reading.
As the title suggests however, the core of the book deals with Reg’s time in the army, from enlistment and training, to his arrival in Port Moresby and frontline service firstly at Milne Bay, then on the Kokoda Trail and later at Sanananda.
Each chapter is full of revealing anecdotes that paint a vivid picture of army life; the good, the bad and the sometimes terribly ugly. Much of the focus is on the bonds of comradeship forged among men from all walks of life who came together in a common cause, and who endured appalling hardships in the desperate struggle to defend Australia from the advancing Japanese.
If I had one reservation, it would be in reference to a particularly disturbing incident where Reg and his comrades are guided to the site of a massacre perpetrated by a large group of Japanese ‘officers’. It seems unlikely that the discovery of 25 murdered and dismembered European women and the subsequent deaths in action of 40 Japanese and one Australian soldier would have gone either unrecorded at the time or undiscovered later.
That aside, there is a great humanity and generosity of spirit to The Digger of Kokoda and it perhaps serves as a timely reminder that however monstrous wars invariably are, they sometimes need to be fought.
Reviewed by Jack Francis
by Jenni Leigh | Aug 17, 2022 | Good Reading Magazine, Latest Reviews, Lifestyle, Sport & Leisure, Non-Fiction |
Richard Cashman wears many hats. He’s a university professor, a historian, a biographer, co-founder of the Australian Society for Sports History … and a left-handed batsman. It’s this last hat, referenced in the title and celebrating his love of cricket, that he wears most happily and humbly.
This memoir bears a historian’s eye for detail, along with an uncanny knack of being close to important world events. ‘May you live in interesting times’ is a well-known Chinese curse, but for Cashman it’s been a blessing.
His education in History began at Sydney University with postgraduate study at Monash, becoming the first-ever graduate from that nascent institution. At that stage, Cashman’s academic interest was in Indian History; sport was a pastime. He studied for his PhD at Duke University, North Carolina, in 1963, arriving just before JFK was assassinated. He returned to Australia in 1972 – just in time for Gough Whitlam’s election win – and lectured at UNSW.
When his love of India, its cricket and historiography intersected, a writing career was born. It’s unthinkable now but connecting ‘sport’ with ‘history’ was anathema to the academy then. Biographies of famous sportspeople soon followed. A conversation in the back of a taxi was the catalyst for co-organising the first sports history conference in 1977. The memoir also features Cashman’s interest in politics, its internecine battles and cast of ‘colourful characters’, plus the political intrigue of university life.
The attention to chronology, rather than theme, can be frustrating: reader interest is stirred in one direction before the author veers towards another. Cashman is a gifted storyteller, however, and carries the reader with him through his ‘interesting times’.
Reviewed by Bob Moore
