The Australian emphasis means that the review ignores the fierce controversy about the quality of many entries in the ODNB that has dominated the letters columns of the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books for weeks. The life of Florence Nightingale is particularly controversial, and our own Barry Smith has been an important contributor to the subject – work overlooked in the ABR notice.

There were some slips. A minor one is the year that Stanley Melbourne Bruce died – 1967 in real life (and in the ODNB), but 1968 in the review.

Mr Trumble writes: ‘Curiously, in a book that aims to get the fine detail exactly right, no mention is made by T.G. Rosenthal of the remarkable fact that Sidney Nolan, RA, was the only Australian (never mind Australian artist) ever to be made both a Companion of Honour and a member of the Order of Merit, a really intriguing mark of his high standing in Britain.’ It would, indeed. But he wasn’t. Nolan did receive the OM (in 1983), but he was never made a Companion of Honour. I think Mr Trumble was confused by Nolan’s AC, awarded in 1988 – a Companion of the Order of Australia. With the exception of Essington Lewis and the Adelaide-born Lawrence Bragg, every Australian to have received a CH has been a (non-Labor) politician.

Some British artists have been given the CH, among them David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, Victor Pasmore, Lucian Freud and Bridget Riley. The only artists to have held both OM and CH were Freud and Henry Moore, unless we include the painter Winston Churchill.

Barry Jones, Melbourne, Vic.

A toxic cocktail

Dear Editor,

Peter Rodgers, in his response (ABR, February 2005) to my review of his book Herzl’s Nightmare, takes refuge in the clichéd response of any author who dislikes a review of his work, and expresses doubts as to whether I actually read his book before I reviewed it in ABR (December 2004–January 2005). Let me assure Mr Rodgers that I have indeed read every word of Herzl’s Nightmare: One Land, Two People. And I stand by my view that Rodgers’s book presents a toxic cocktail of sloppy research and tendentious pseudo-journalism.

Rodgers accuses Israeli founding father David Ben Gurion of seeking the expulsion of the Arabs. But the bibliography of Herzl’s Nightmare includes a reference to a book by Ephraim Karsh that categorically proves Rodgers’s accusation to be a complete misrepresentation of Ben Gurion’s words. This slipshod scholarship is characteristic of the whole book. Moreover, I am willing to debate the substance of my critique: something that Rodgers appears unwilling to do in his letter. When I assert that Rodgers harbours a thinly veiled desire for Israel’s demise, he ripostes with a quip that my contention would be ‘laughable’ if it weren’t so serious. But Rodgers presents nothing serious to rebut my contention that he is an anti-Zionist. Indeed, the final chapter of his book is entitled ‘Apocalypse Soon?’, and it is little more than a lugubrious parade of doomsayers who predict Israel’s coming destruction. When Rodgers interjects his own views into his narrative, he takes care to pose his eschatological outlook in the form of a question. But despite this perfunctory nod at even-handedness, the premise of his book is clear: Israel is on the way out, and that’s not such a bad thing.

Colin Rubenstein, Caulfield, Vic.

Preaching to the converted

Dear Editor,

The intellectual snobbery of Gillian Dooley and Nicola Walker, who reviewed, respectively, Bryce Courtenay’s Brother Fish and Colleen McCullough’s Angel Puss in the February 2005 issue of ABR, is largely redressed by the excellent essay by Peter Goldsworthy (‘Famous Battles in the War between Words and Music: From Monteverdi to Puff Daddy’), in the same issue. Clearly, Dr Goldsworthy understands the importance of popular culture and its effect on high art. Simply stated, you can’t have one without the other. Dooley and Walker seem to subscribe to the belief that popular tastes have little to contribute to national character and values.

While our public intellectuals continue to have this debate between themselves, there is a real risk that the rest of us will be excluded and forced to adopt the role of spectators. Your ‘Letters’ page provides an important forum, but, more often than not, it is taken up with writers preaching to the converted. It seems to me that we need to hear from more dissenting voices – from people who are not offended by popular success.

While I can’t say I find Bryce Courtenay a great read, many people obviously do, and their sensibilities should be respected. I was sorry to hear Malcolm Knox tell Margaret Throsby on ABC Radio that he had never read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code – this from the literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. I once heard Mr Knox explain that his role was not to draw attention to books that were already a commercial success; he was there to discover the nuggets of creative talent and wisdom. I think Mr Knox is having himself on.

I wonder what Dooley and Walker would have to say if they were working on Grub Street and were asked to review Great Expectations or David Copperfield. Books that have been tested by popular taste and have survived usually last a lot longer than the incestuous angst that passes for contemporary literature.

Readers need heroes. I see nothing wrong with this. The vapid, self-indulgent creations that are currently fashionable among our literati do not serve us well.

Val Wake, Port Macquarie, NSW

Remembering the general reader

Dear Editor,

John Golder’s review of Kathleen Riley’s book on Nigel Hawthorne (ABR, March 2005) will doubtless inform all the other researchers and ‘experts’ on the theatre who read it. He does a disservice to general readers, however, by steering them away from this well-written and interesting account of the professional life of one of Britain’s greatest and best-loved actors. The book is liberally laced with quotes from Hawthorne himself and from reviews of his plays, and with comments from Hawthorne’s contemporaries. The problems are those of all ‘authorised’ biographies: namely, a tendency towards hagiography, and the presence of what are obviously ‘no-go’ areas in personal relationships. As I understand it, ABR is intended for a general readership and thus is not the place for narrow specialist reviews.

David Christie, Barwon Heads, Vic.

The gods punish us

Dear Editor,

The gods punish us, they say, by granting us our wishes, and so, in hoping for notice to be taken by ABR of my book A Great Australian School: Wesley College Examined, I was rewarded with Martin Crotty’s grudging praise for a ‘limited’ if ‘impressive piece of detailed study and sustained narrative’ (ABR, March 2005). Crotty spends much of his review inventing motivations for this work which impugn me as writer and historian, and to which I must respond.

This was a commissioned book but an independent history, except only for the cover, which was imposed upon me. It was not written ‘by Wesley’, as I had no previous connection, and have no continuing association, with the school. As I say in the text, it became ‘monumental’ not by the school’s wish but through my advocacy, for the initial brief was to write a catch-up history from the 1967 centenary. After starting work and finding new material, I convinced the college that the first century of the school needed to be re-examined and explained to readers who no longer knew what Methodists or Australian Public Schools were.

Crotty then divines that my motivation was ‘to overthrow heresies that came to the fore in the centenary history (namely, Adamson’s excessive fondness for his boys)’. This is quite wrong. That earlier history never went further than the passing innuendo that Adamson (headmaster from 1902–32) was a bachelor with a taste for young, male athletes. Until my book, no one had ever put into print specific allegations against Adamson. I have done so, presenting all the evidence at my disposal, along with the context and a frank discussion of his background. That makes me accuser as much as defender. In reality, it is my attempt at historical explanation of a complex and manipulative man. This is worth analysis because Adamson’s suspect and now unfashionable opinions on the education of boys were very influential in Australian life in the first half or more of the twentieth century.

Most distressing is Crotty’s misreading of my commentary on Brian Lewis’s childhood memoirs of Wesley during World War I. The late Professor Lewis was an accurate, astute observer whose testimony I repeat in some detail. My job was to provide the context for Lewis’s views while trying to make sense of the attitudes of those who angered him. I cannot see how anyone could read my chapter ‘Songs of War’ without construing it as a profoundly anti-war piece of writing, nor the book as a whole without being alerted to my use of irony. The passage to which the reviewer takes exception appears as I introduce the debate over Adamson: ‘Felix Meyer says fairly that in the darkest days of the war, Adamson grieved earnestly over the lost boys and “died daily”. Owen Lewis, on the other hand, died once.’ There is then a break in the text. Did I need to explain I was intentionally setting up the shocking contrast between the metaphor used by Adamson’s 1932 hagiographer and the stark sacrifice of the one and actual life of poor, young, promising, brave, bloodied Owen Lewis, shot down in the final days of the war?

A less literal-minded reader than Martin Crotty might find this history less limited and more universal.

Andrew Lemon, Eltham, Vic.

Getting away with it

Dear Editor,

It was interesting to read Nick Drayson’s review of Australian Magpies, by Gisela Kaplan (ABR, March 2005), given my own reaction to the book. His conclusion, that Kaplan’s ‘information is sound and her presentation clear’, contrasts with my assessment: the book contains many typos, along with errors of fact and prose of an outstanding level of obfuscation. The typos are easy enough to find, as are the errors of fact, if you know what you are looking for (‘all birds have either three or four digits’: not so; the Channel-billed Cuckoo ‘is no longer as common as it once was in its eastern distribution’: sorry, no; and so on).

Drayson failed to mention the book’s problems in his review, but, as a perceptive reader, he was surely aware of them. I have two concerns with reviews that seem to take as a given that no adverse comment will be included. First, this approach is essentially dishonest and knowingly gives readers a false impression of the book. Second, as long as reviewers fail to speak out and thereby pretend that poorly written and produced books are acceptable, then publishers will reckon that they can get away with it, and there will be little incentive for them to lift their game. What I don’t understand, however, is an author’s role in this situation. It is presumably true that economic rationalism is causing publishers to shed proof-readers and editors, as pointed out by Rod Beecham in a review in the same issue of ABR. But where are the authors? Don’t they produce the original manuscript, and aren’t they able to make corrections at the proof stage? Are they as little interested in the quality of presentation of work that bears their name as some publishers seem to be?

For what it’s worth, my review of Australian Magpies will appear later this year in the journal Australian Field Ornithology, published by the Bird Observers Club of Australia.

Andrew Ley, Armidale, NSW