He is committed to the melancholy Andersonian tenet that social planning is dangerous because its results are unforeseeable, and he is convinced that disarmament is a Stalinist conspiracy. But even in this cheerless philosophy there is room for hope. Sipping coffee on a street in Aden, Donald comes to the conclusion that the day on which pavement cafes appear in Sydney will mark the birth of a more sophisticated Australia.

But Donald, in his thirties, is not now primarily concerned with the cultural health of Australia. This is a voyage of escape from colonial isolation and from journalism – a voyage in search of self in England, he believes, he will discover the novelist he aspires to become. Even on the voyage his first manuscript is well advanced.

In England the plumbing is awful. The cooking is drab. And life in the village of Ethel’s girlhood is eccentrically provincial ... all of which make excellent copy for the Daily Telegraph back in Sydney. But, for Donald, England is also a Hornecoming, a place of literary reference points and possibilities, the place in which he plans to begin his personal recon­struction by re-reading the books, particularly the many novels, which he has carted half way round the world.

There is also the bracing prospect of physical work, toiling with Ethel to reclaim the dilapidated garden of her family Horne. But Donald is gradually drawn away from his wife’s project, and ultimately from his wife herself. The first such distraction is the opportunity to participate in the power-play of English politics. In a village obsessed with the comings and goings of the vicar, and where the most controversial issue concerns the erection of a single streetlamp, Horne becomes the foundation chairman of the village branch of the Conservative Party, and masterminds the success­ful strategy of the local Conservative candidate.

But Horne is no mindless Tory. In his heart he is a sort of radical conservative, a Man of Letters, a polymath who sees himself reading books in order to discover about life. While London bustles with Australian acquaintances who are all becoming successful and settled, Donald remains poor and undirected. But gains are being made. At every opportunity he visits the National Gallery, learning lessons from each room, as he studies them, one by one. And all the while he is working away, writing and revising his two great novels. Neither will ever be published.

In the months which follow, Donald and Ethel do England, searching for the authentic England of Donald’s imagination – and holding themselves aloof from the tourists who seem in search of something more vulgar and more ephemeral.

In 195l or 1952, they visit the little Cornish fishing village of Polperro. Today Polperro is a tourist circus. Travellers who visit there can no longer hang back, as the Hornes did, from the role of tourist. The very act of parking in the huge hill-top carpark is an act of submission. You are committed to join the crowd, stumbling down those cobbled streets which wind through the freshly painted village. But the Polperro which the Hornes visit is already becoming a spectacle for tourists – and the Hornes leave appalled. But the following winter they return, and live for six months in a house close by the village, where Donald attempts to perfect his novels, and Ethel thinks of practical ways in which they might earn a living – perhaps they might start a guest house. By now their main source of income is Ethel’s inheritance which is fast drying up. Increasingly, Donald is gripped by a terror that the bright young talker will degenerate into an ageing windbag – a pub bore who has achieved nothing.

In the end, it is not high culture, but Frank Packer, that delivers Donald from despair and introspection. Life – and this book – really take off when Donald lands a job on a trashy London tabloid. He takes to it with a mixture of loathing and zest, calling it a ‘piratical adventure’. His first assignment is to write a story to accompany a headline which his editor has already created: ‘I CHANGED MY SEX AND MARRIED. (In this business, it’s the headings which come first. Tabloid editors, it turns out, have drawers full of them).

‘I wrote the story at once,’ says Horne, ‘but to give it greater verisimilitude, I did not hand it in for several days’:

Ten years ago, I, too, changed from a woman to a man. It was in 1942 that my sex changed. I was 20, and as far as everyone knew, I was a young woman. I was ashamed of my hairiness and worried almost to despiration that my interests lay more in the direction of women than men.

As a woman I had always been mannish, but as a man I felt – somehow – womanly.

Donald, it seems, writes this kind of stuff with virtuoso ease. And he revels in his skill. In any case, it is to be only a ‘passing adventure’ he tells himself. But when Frank Packer offers Donald the job of setting up an Australian offshoot of the paper, Donald agrees – but only, he insists, for six months.

So he bids farewell to England, and his increasingly invisible English wife, and flies to Sydney – to the heart of the Packer empire. He arrives to take charge of the new Weekend with a suitcase full of pin-up girls’ photos, purchased en route in New York. Back Horne, we see the bright young man bullying, drinking, arguing and joking his way through his new, trashy job – making money, selling papers, and living in style.

Now all this was news to me. I knew about the Donald Horne who had edited Quadrant and the Bulletin. And every year I take tutorials in which undergraduates discuss the impact of Horne’s The Lucky Country. I was personally moved by the Donald Horne who, in the wake of the Whitlam sacking, campaigned for constitutional reform. One of the formative experiences of my own undergraduate years was the rally held in the Melbourne Town Hall on the first anniversary of the dismissal. Donald Horne was one of the speakers; I was thrilled, and won over, by the splendidly iconoclastic gesture he made when he stepped up to the microphone, held a copy of the Constitution in the air, and said, ‘This, ladies and gentlemen, is a document we must learn to despise.’

So what are we to make of all this? What, indeed, does Donald Horne make of it? Was he ‘Captain Horne, the gentleman desperado’ – the editor who once arranged an office party in which an all-but-naked girl leaped out of a cardboard cake? Or was he Horne ‘the windbag and failure’?

The point is that he is neither. The narrator of this book has a generous and thoughtful voice. The moments of strength and the moments of self-doubts which it recounts have a universal familiarity. Ah yes, I found myself saying, I too have known the self-indulgent breakdown, I too have dreamt such dreams. The splendour of this book is that it comes from a writer who can admit to it all – not in any kind of confessional, but simply because that’s the way it was. The result is a frank and energetic story, and a rewarding summer read.