Book reviewer COLIN STEELE wraps up a year of wide reading to settle on five of his favourites.
Craig Brown, the award-winning and best-selling author of One Two Three Four on the Beatles and Ma’am Darling on Princess Margaret, now turns his attention to Queen Elizabeth II in A Voyage Around the Queen (Fourth Estate, $37.99).
Brown creates a fascinating biographical mosaic of the Queen in 112 short chapters, constructed from memoirs, diaries, essays, cultural history, travelogues and imagined events. Brown’s original approach sheds remarkable light on the most public yet most private of sovereigns. Brown sees Elizabeth as “a kind of anchor to people . . . She inhabited the psyche of a nation”.
The nearly 650 pages contain hundreds of vignettes ranging from the Queen finding Donald Trump “very rude”, to Labour minister Tony Benn’s failing to remove the Queen’s head from postage stamps, to her terrifying guests, such as Marilyn Monroe and Kingsley Amis, the latter so frightened of personal defecation that he took “a firewall of imodium”. And, of course, there is a chapter on the corgis, whose ferocity Brown “compares to the Corleone family”. A wonderfully readable book that both republicans and royalists will enjoy.
JAMES Fairfax (1933-2017), one of Australia’s greatest philanthropists and art collectors, was a director on the Fairfax publishing company board (1957-1987) and chairman (1977-1987). In the sumptuously produced James Fairfax: Portrait of a Collector in Eleven Objects (New South, $49.99), Fairfax’s nephew Alexander Gilly spins off 11 objects and private letters to document the complex public, and often very private life, of James Fairfax, within Australian politics, society and culture.
The 11 artefacts include a long-case clock built by Fairfax’s grandfather and given to his parents as a wedding gift, now housed in the National Trust Retford Park estate; a Henry Moore silkscreen; a Rubens painting; a Robert Klippel sculpture and a large satirical mural painted by Donald Friend. Gilly explores privilege amidst difficult family relationships, within an imploding newspaper empire. A revealing and empathetic book.
GINA Chick, the inaugural winner of SBS series Alone Australia, delivers a frank and moving autobiography in We Are the Stars (Simon & Schuster, $36.99 ), which follows Gina from a decidedly unconventional childhood, to troubled times in Sydney in her 20s and living “wild” in her 30s.
Chick documents her battle with breast cancer and the loss of her three-year-old daughter, but the book is ultimately life-affirming, with Gina ultimately finding love, particularly in nature. The discovery that she was the granddaughter of Charmian Clift confirms her genetic communication skills, to which those who attended Chick’s event at the Street Theatre in September will testify.
MY Life in Music by Antonio Pappano (Faber $49.99) sees Pappano, the music director of London’s Royal Opera House (2002 -2024), engagingly tell how a boy, born in Epping in 1959 to parents who had emigrated from rural Italy, became a renowned figure in music, culminating in his conducting the music at the Coronation of King Charles.
Pappano’s descriptions of his early life and travels are revealing before describing a stunning musical career scale in America, Europe and Britain. His love of music shines through. He denies that classical music and opera are elitist: “You can be called an elite athlete and that’s great, but in the classical world if you are ‘elite’ you are seen as an effete toff.” He attacks the Conservative politicians in Britain who cut arts funding: “I wish politicians would be open to what’s going on in the arts… Theatre, opera, concerts are brain-openers as well as heart-openers”. Hear hear.
RICHIE Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes, by renowned British historian David Kynaston and critic Harry Ricketts (Bloomsbury, $44.95) is a compelling account of sporting and social history seen through the prism of the fourth Test match between England and Australia at Old Trafford in July 1961.
They follow the changing fortunes of a dramatic Test match, which decided the Ashes, through key players, notably the respective captains: England’s reserved public school establishment figure Peter May and the ebullient, former Sydney crime-beat journalist. Richie Benaud, who checked the Old Trafford pitch wearing blue suede shoes. Australia famously won the match with an inspired spell of Benaud spin bowling, England losing nine wickets for 51, including Benaud bowling May for a duck.
This match hastened the fall of the “Gentlemen” and “Players” codes, a sort of cricketing social apartheid. Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes brilliantly recounts one dramatic game of cricketing history against the changing social structure of Britain in the 1960s.
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