Rupert Murdoch certainly attracts a good class of biographer. There was George Munster, who contributed so much to Australian politics and culture by helping to establish and edit Nation, and William Shawcross, one of Britain’s most prominent journalists. There were other biographies, too, before the efforts of Bruce Page, a distinguished investigative journalist with the London Sunday Times, who went on to edit the New Statesman from 1978 to 1982.

Page acknowledges his debt to the earlier biographies, particularly Munster’s marvellous Rupert Murdoch: A paper prince (1985). He is less partial to Shawcross’s Rupert Murdoch (1992), describing Shawcross as an ‘agreeable biographer’ and declaring it ‘an important measure of Murdoch’s manipulative capacity that he has more than once been able to persuade skilful, well-respected writers to accommodate insolent misrepresentations which are convenient to his purpose’. In The Murdoch Archipelago, so rich in subtexts, it is fascinating to trace the story of other Murdoch biographies: we are told (twice) that Thomas Kiernan’s attempt to produce an authorised biography failed when the author rejected Murdoch’s concept of editorial independence, resulting in Citizen Murdoch (1986) being published without approval and viewed as ‘deeply unfair’ in Murdoch circles; and we learn that a decade before penning Virtual Murdoch (2001), the business journalist Neil Chenoweth was prevented from writing a story exposing Queensland Press’s highly unorthodox purchase of News Corporation shares. Page could have shared other stories with us: the fate of C.E. Sayers’s biography of Sir Keith Murdoch, which languishes, unpublished, in the State Library of Victoria, and Rupert Murdoch’s decision in 1991 to shelve work on an autobiography.

The first edition of David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language appeared in 1995, and was widely acclaimed. It covered an extraordinary amount of material under the broad topics of ‘The History of English’, ‘English Vocabulary’, ‘English Grammar’, ‘Spoken and Written English’, ‘Using English’ and ‘Learning about English’. It used modern design techniques and was richly illustrated with all kinds of visual material. It was a book that allowed extended reading of essays on particular topics, or dipping and pursuing cross-references. This second edition appears eight years later. Has English changed sufficiently in those eight years to justify a new edition? Is there enough new material in this new edition to persuade someone who bought the first edition in 1995 to buy the 2003 one?

Anyone who heard Inga Clendinnen’s 1999 Boyer Lectures or who has listened to her in any other way will hear her voice clearly in this book: contemplative, reflective, warm, gently paced. Dancing with Strangers seems to have been written as if it were meant to be read aloud. It reaches out to its listeners, drawing them within the world of the settlement at Port Jackson during its first dozen years, from 1778 to 1800. The two leading figures are Governor Arthur Phillip (who departed in 1792) and Bennelong.

Clendinnen’s method is ethnographic history. This offers a way into the past that, in good hands, is full of brilliant possibilities. The trick lies in choosing a period that is richly documented, fastening on the minutiae of behaviour and building up, step by step, the image of a mental universe – another world, vividly patterned and inevitably different from the here and now. Indeed, the reader is invited to move into another here and now.

A great deal depends on the way in which the writer issues that invitation. Ethnographic history, once an exciting aspect of Australian scholarship (especially in Melbourne), has fallen under a shadow lately, and part of the reason lies in the difficulty of persuading readers to take the kind of journey it involves. Questions of identity and ethnicity, leading historical issues since the 1990s, complicate the invitation too much. Readers nowadays don’t leave behind their own here and now, their own identity and ethnicity, as easily as they used to do. History tries to say at least a little about what readers might be themselves, as much as about past Others.

One of the hardest things a reviewer can be asked to do is to produce copy about a book that is so beautifully done that commentary on it seems both ridiculous and vaguely offensive. That is my predicament here. It is with a certain wry delight that I can report that this is the second time I have been in this position in recent months. The other book was a first novel, too. It is tremendously heartening to know that creative writing not merely good but of the highest order is being produced in these dismal times.