Michael Davie

When Bob Hawke romped home in the Australian federal election last March, becoming the first Labor Prime Minister since 1975, a colleague remarked drily that the election could have been won by a drover’s dog. Another colleague, Bill Hayden, said it could have been won by a cripple. Hayden, now Australia’s Foreign Minister, had reasons to be less than wholly delighted by Hawke’s triumph. Until the very day that the election was called, Hayden was the Labor leader. He was dumped after years of loyal service on the grounds that he was uninspiring whereas Hawke, although he had been an MP for only three years, was a born vote-getter. Hawke’s rise has been phenomenal. Before he became an MP, with his hooded eyes firmly fixed on the Prime Minister’s job, he had been president for a decade of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. It was as if Len Murray had decided to have a go at politics and had suddenly been propelled into Downing Street.

The external paraphernalia of Evelyn Waugh included check suits, an ear-trumpet, a watch-chain, cigars, unfashionable Victorian paintings, a large family and a West Country manor house. To those interested by what lay behind these characteristically English defences, this selection of his letters may come as a disappointment. When Waugh died in 1966, the outside world possessed little reliable information about the nature of the beast inside the baroque carapace. Only occasionally would the monster come out of his lair: sometimes in print to deride Picasso or Auden, sometimes in person to insult his friends. For all the outside world could tell, though the evidence of his books seemed to argue against the conclusion, he truly was a snob, a religious bigot, an anti-semite, an anti-foreigner, a near-fascist.