Anthony Hill begins his biography of Jim Martin by describing Martin’s death. Beginning the story of a person’s life by going straight to the end is unusual but wholly appropriate in this case because Jim Martin’s fame lies solely in the fact that his death at the age of fourteen, at Gallipoli, makes him the youngest known Australian soldier ever to die in a war.

At first, it would seem impossible to write the life story of an early twentieth-century, working-class teenager. Jim, in his short life, did not have the time to amass the life experiences – or the papers, letters and diaries – normally deemed necessary for a biography. By necessity, Hill has made assumptions to fill the gaps in the small amount that is directly known of Martin’s life. While he describes the result as a ‘biographical novel’, his speculations are generally plausible.

Jim Martin had an unremarkable childhood in the Murray River town of Tocumwal, New South Wales, and in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn, where his mother, Amelia, ran a boarding house. Hill shows well how Jim was surrounded by the values of empire loyalty and martial pride in his schooling, in the Federal Government’s compulsory military training scheme for boys aged twelve and over, and in the frenzy of patriotism that followed the outbreak of war in 1914. These values came to the fore in early 1915 when Jim decided, following his father Charlie’s failed attempt to enlist, that he should go in his stead. Jim was already five feet six inches tall, and knew he could pass for eighteen. He told his parents that he was going to join up: if they told the Army he was eighteen he would promise to write letters to them, but if they did not give permission he would join up using an assumed name and they would not hear from him at all. Faced with this horrible dilemma, Amelia wrote a note giving consent for Jim’s enlistment.

Peter Singer occupies a distinguished position at the Centre for Human Values at Princeton University and is frequently described as the most influential of living philosophers. The front cover of this new selection of his writings couples him with Bertrand Russell and, in some respects, the comparison is sensible. Both philosophers have written clearly and simply on issues that are of interest not only to specialists. They have attracted a wide reading public and achieved the kind of celebrity and notoriety rarely associated with philosophers. Both have been activists – Russell mainly in the cause of pacifism and nuclear disarmament, Singer in the cause of animal liberation and the preservation of the environment – and both have stood for parliament. Each has been the object of energetic campaigns to have major academic appointments in America rescinded, as well as of public protests and demonstrations, threats, violence, and vilification. Of course, things have been worse for philosophers: they have been burned, shot, and hanged. But in this century, anyway, the more peremptory measures were usually remedies for their extracurricular activities, not for their teaching. So the animus against Russell and Singer has been unusual in focussing less on their political activism than on the expression of their moral views: in Russell’s case, principally the advocacy of a more casual attitude to free love, and in Singer’s, principally a more casual attitude to killing people.

‘A king had a beautiful daughter,’ begins David Foster’s new book: 204 pages between grey boards, a reproduction of Filippo Lippi’s Madonna con Bambino e due angeli on the covers, the author’s name itself visible only on the acknowledgements page, in rather small writing.

A king had a beautiful daughter. She was so beautiful that any man who saw her at once wanted to marry her. Well, the poor old king got so fed up with this he locked his daughter in a round tower where an old monastery had once stood. Round towers have a door about four metres off the ground and this one was no different. If you want to know what a round tower looks like, there are sixty-five left, in part or in ruins, through Ireland, a few in Scotland, one on the Isle of Man

Now, the king has lost the key to that tower, and has proclaimed that any man who can get the door open can have his daughter’s hand, and lo!, one day a poor woodcutter decides that he will give it a go.

This lengthy analysis of Catholics and the anti-Communist struggle in Australia during the 1950s uncovers important and previously unreleased primary sources. In line with the author’s background as a Catholic Redemptorist priest, this particularly applies to material from Australian church archives and those of the Vatican, and from the files of B.A. Santamaria’s anti-Communist ‘Movement’. At the time, Santamaria’s ‘crusade’ against the atheistic and allegedly revolutionary Communist Party was strongly supported by the Redemptorist order, especially in Victoria.

Another strength of Father Duncan’s book is the painstaking way in which he details the intrigue and conflict about the Movement within the Catholic Church in Australia. This primarily centred on whether Santamaria’s ultimate aim was not just to defeat the Communists but was also a clandestine bid for political power. In any event, the Sydney hierarchy opposed what they took to be an unwarranted extension of the Movement’s goals. Yet even after they succeeded in obtaining Vatican intervention, Santamaria and his great patron, Melbourne’s Irish-born Archbishop Daniel Mannix, continued to resist Roman efforts to separate the connection between the Movement and the Catholic Church in Australia.