So much shown in a little space
All humbleness, all dignity,
Hand-work – the Knitted Nativity!
Seeing, one whistles on an arc of breath
Wonderful, oh wonderful!

This is a selection of the quotations Mark Latham collected during his time in local and federal politics. The quotations are arranged alphabetically by subject, from ‘Aboriginal People’ to ‘Working Class’. Given Latham’s career, it is not surprising that the emphasis is on political quotations and quotations from politicians.

Some quotations are quite familiar, as with Winston Churchill’s comment on a former Conservative MP who was seeking to stand as a liberal: ‘The only instance of a rat swimming towards a sinking ship.’ I was touched by Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s incisive critique of colonising missionaries: ‘When the missionaries first came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray” and when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land.’ Charles de Gaulle demonstrates Gallic culinary wit: ‘How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?’ Readers will find their own favourites.

Gough Whitlam is idolised, Bob Hawke respected, and Paul Keating admired, but Barry Jones is undoubtedly the most loved by the Labor party rank and file, a lovability which puzzled many of his colleagues in the Hawke government (1983–91). Insofar as they recognised it, they qualified it – labelling him ‘a loveable eccentric’ – a characterisation of which Jones himself is aware. There is little in his political career to explain this phenomenon. An assiduous figure in the Victorian Labor Opposition for five years, he was a junior minister for six years in the Hawke government, in his own words ‘a minister low in the food chain … [who had a] chequered career as Minister for Science’; he was then ‘defenestrated’ as a minister by his own Centre-Left faction, only to be resurrected as National Party President on and off during the years of Labor’s decline and fall. How does this scarcely stellar political career translate into such enduring popularity?

A clue may lie in parallels with Pauline Hanson, whose ‘preliterate approach’ to politics Jones despised. Both Hanson and Jones radiate a kind of childlike quality, innocents abroad in a world of feral adults. Yet despite her naïveté, Hanson shook the liberal verities of Australian politics, while, despite his innocence, Jones has been a remarkable accumulator of political patronage. Moreover, just as Hanson’s popularity derived from her ‘not being one of them’ (a politician), so his derives from being so much more than a politician. In an age in which politicians rank low in public esteem, being more than, less than or just not one of them is an invaluable political asset. And Jones is perhaps the most extraordinary polymath ever to have sat in an Australian parliament.

Quiz king, politician, ambassador, author, traveller, cultural commissar in the arts, education and film, adjunct professor, Cambridge college fellow – the range of his roles boggles the imagination. He was a seminal figure in the revival of the film industry in Australia in the 1970s; his book Sleepers, Wake! (1982) is one of the more important works published by an Australian in the latter part of the twentieth century; The Macmillan Dictionary of Biography (1981, 1986, 1989) was a monumental achievement; and for a decade he was at the heart of UNESCO, first as Australian executive board member, and then as ambassador.

Dennis Altman

In any given year we will read but a tiny handful of potential ‘best books’, so this is no more than a personal selection. Here are two novels that stand out: Stephen Eldred-Grigg’s Shanghai Boy (Vintage) and Hari Kunzru’s Tranmission (Penguin). Both speak of the confusion of identity and emotions caused by rapid displacement across the world. The first is the account of a middle-aged New Zealand teacher who falls disastrously in love while teaching in Shanghai. Transmission takes a naïve young Indian computer programmer to the United States, with remarkable consequences. From a number of political books, let me select two, both from my own publisher, Scribe, which offers, I regret, no kickbacks. One is George Megalogenis’s The Longest Decade; the other, James Carroll’s House of War. Together they provide a depressing but challenging backdrop to understanding the current impasse of the Bush–Howard administrations in Iraq.