It comes as no surprise to learn that this young man, drafted into the Army with his Sydney University course unfinished, should be obsessed with Stendhal. Horne’s creation is Stendhalian to the core, a new boy encountering strange worlds, moving through them with naiveté, cunning, and enthusiasm, presented for our entertainment by a genial author whose overall kindness to his character does not prevent him from showing us all manner of youthful folly and innocent idiocy.

Very early on this not-so-young Donald realises that the incidents which befall him and into which he falls are shaped like ‘exemplary tales’. ‘I recognised I was in the presence of an anecdote that would have an awesomely long life.’ This vision of life as anecdote allows Donald a detachment (and Horne a double detachment) which pushes these confessions into a series of exemplary tales, free from pain, though not sadness, flecked with humour at all times, and often very funny.

What does not-so-young Donald do when he finds the woman he is living with in bed with a British naval officer?

It occurred to me later that the way I acted was more Dostoevskian than Chekhovian. I did not shout about love, but yelled out that her poetry was flat in tone and belonged to the wrong school … that verse plays on radio were a bore … that she talked too much … that there was more to life than a good mayonnaise.

Telling reproofs, those! But he went further. He tossed the naval officer’s cap out of the window; and, to top his unbridled rage, shouted out to the neighbours, through the window, her exact age. After which he left.

Later he became good friends with the naval officer, with whom he used earnestly to discuss literature: ‘When we talked about novels, we were deciding existence.’

Part of Horne’s craft is to shape young Donald as a fugitive literary character, now Stendhalian, now Chekhovian, now Proustian. His few love affairs were subjected to the grid of literary analysis: ‘To my … taste [her] letter was overdone: it needed rewriting and toning down, particularly the phrase “kissing the air which offers me your lips”’. So much for that one – if she couldn’t write good prose, she could hardly share life with one whose existence was defined by his latest literary discovery (was he Waugh at this time or Thomas Mann?).

Anecdotes and fictive characters are enjoyable and fun in themselves, but they also capture for us a world and a social context. Horne’s book gives us a distinct feel for the young man’s Sydney of the forties. We meet the powerful and enigmatic Jim McAuley – it was McAuley’s view of his lover’s verse which first made him shaky; the mysterious Alf Conlon, pipe in hand, acting imperturbably, but hatching grand and important schemes; the young John Kerr:

As with Conlon, it was all policy and power he was talking about, but without Conlon’s sense of absurdity and also without Conlon's mildness and friendliness. He was speaking to me with great eloquence, but contemptuously, as if he were merely using me for practice.

This was Australia of the war years, when Canberra was slowly realising that it needed a foreign policy of its own. Horne was one of the first group of twelve diplomatic cadets selected to study for the corps, but lack of money, the gloom of Canberra, and his need for a more active life with friends in Sydney drove him back to the Sunday Telegraph staff and the strange world of journalism.

He tells of Brian Penton’s Monday sessions with his feature writers, Penton calling for ideas and dismissing most of them as soon as they were voiced. He recounts being dropped as feature writer without explanation, then being resurrected again, just as inexplicably; of being sacked by Frank Packer and then befriended by him; of the uncertain life of a young reporter, now victim, now beneficiary of top­level rivalries about which he knew nothing except rumours. Was he dropped as feature writer because of enmity between Sid Deamer and Brian Penton? Was Packer really pleased with him or was this only a wily prelude to another sacking? Throughout it all, the not-so-young Donald continued to harbour his literary ambition, learnt to cook and appreciate good wine, drank enormous amounts with his fellow scribblers at Ushers, at the King’s Head or the Royal Standard, and began to think about his ‘career’ (always mentioned in inverted commas).

The dominant influence, however, during all this period, was not Alec Hope, or McAuley, or Conlon, but John Anderson. Not-so-young Donald was a libertarian socialist, concerned by the conservatism of both the business world and the Labor Party. He believed firmly in Anderson’s theory that in the welfare state ‘the desire for security and sufficiency is the very mark of the servile mentality’. It was rebellion against this servile mentality that informed much of the not-so­young Donald’s writings and activities during this period, and which allowed him, even when placed necessarily in a servile position, in the Army or as a diplomatic cadet or young journalist, to remain his own person, and to see the world and life as anecdote.

I suspect too that Horne’s deep sense of humour and his love of Australia even down to its ‘pure vowel sounds’ (‘the “high” “clipped” English voice I had been brought up to hear as a voice of command’), spring partly from his lasting hatred of servility. His portrait of himself as a young journalist is often very funny, as no doubt he himself now sees that familiar stranger. The past is a tricky ball to juggle skilfully. Horne shows himself a master juggler and his confessions need no penance.