FEAST OR FAMINE

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  Mr and Mrs Jinnah: The Marriage that Shook India  by Sheela Reddy (2022) is an account of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and his wife Ruttie Jinnah, set in Delhi, Bombay (Mumbai) and Karachi from 1918.   Mohammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948) knew Rattanbai “Ruttie” Petit (1900-1929) from birth. When she was sixteen, 24 years his junior, she became his second wife in 1918, despite their age, background and religious differences: “The marriage seemed an impossibility. Viewed from any angle, the hurdles, whether personal, social or legal, were insurmountable.”   While much has been written about Jinnah, little has been written about his wife, who died on her 29 th  birthday, except by Jinnah’s sister Fatima in her autobiography,  My Brother  – and she did not like Ruttie. Sheela Reddy’s book is well-researched from archived material in the Nehru Museum and Memorial Library. Much of the information is derived from letters exchanged between Rutti...

  Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins Australia, I have access to an uncorrected advance edition reading copy of Jeffrey Archer’s pre-published novel  Traitors Gate  (2023).     Set in London from 1996, where Chief Superintendent William Warwick and his second-in-command Inspector Ross Hogan of the Metropolitan Police have been in charge for the past four years of the annual secret operation of the movement of Queen Elizabeth II’s Crown Jewels. Specifically, jewels in this case are the State Crown and Sword – from the impenetrable Jewel House in the Tower of London to the State Opening of Parliament and back again the next day. The code word for this operation is ‘Traitors Gate.’   Businessman and master criminal Miles Faulkner is back in London after four years of self-imposed exile in New York. On his Manhattan apartment wall is the painting by Peter Paul Rubens , Christ’s Descent from the Cross , that he stole from the Fitzmolean Museum. A forgery...

The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy around the World by Gideon Rachman (2021) is an account of recent and current global authoritarian leaders since about the year 2000.   These leaders – all men – include (in chapter order): Russia’s Vladimir Putin,  Türkiye ’s   Recep Tayyip Erdogan, China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Narendra Modi, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson, America’s Donald Trump, Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed.    What do these leaders have in common? ‘These leaders are nationalists and cultural conservatives, with little tolerance for minorities, dissent or the interests of foreigners,’ and who ‘encourage a cult of personality,’ says Gideon Rachman.    Rachman discusses the emergence and rise of the strongman since the new millennium, in terms of how and why – stemmin...

  In Australia, people may have forgotten the man called Christmas. One of Australia’s 31 Prime Ministers from 1901 to the present day was called Christmas. The 27 th  Prime Minister was a woman but Julia Gillard was not called Christmas. Earle Christmas Grafton Page became Australia’s 11 th  Prime Minister in 1939. He was PM for a brief 19 days. That’s not the shortest premiership in Australian political history – that honour goes to Francis Michael Forde, who served for 8 days from 6-13 July 1945 after the death of John Curtin in office. Earle Christmas Grafton Page (1880-1961) was from the Country Party and served from 7-26 April 1939, the second shortest premiership. When PM Joseph Lyons died suddenly in 1939, Governor-General Lord Gowrie (Queen Elizabeth’s representative in Australia) appointed Page as the caretaker Prime Minister while the government, the United Australia Party (UAP), chose a new leader – the former deputy leader Robert Menzies.  Page refused t...

Beyond the Sea: A Wren at War (2021) is the memoir of Englishwoman Christian Lamb during the Second World War.   Christian Lamb (1920-) begins writing her memoir – her fifth book – at the age of 101 during the Covid-19 pandemic.    She writes of growing up for two years in Malta in a naval family, and France for a year, before joining  the Women’s Royal Naval Service (the Wrens) in 1940 as a coder. Her experience at the ‘wrenery’ in London included the wartime bombing Blitz in 1940-1941 in which 20,000 Londoners died. She quickly moves onto the war in the Atlantic and beyond, and her decoding work at Bletchley Park.   This memoir is the extraordinary life of duty in a secret and vital role in the British wartime radar and operations rooms: the training, the strict security, the incoming traffic, the intercepts, the orders, the codes, the translations of German messages, and Winston Churchill’s secret visits to Bletchley Park to thank the decoding wrens in ...

  My Life (2004) is the memoir of Democrat William Jefferson Clinton (1946-), two-term American President from 1993 to 2001.   He begins at birth with the loss of his father William Jefferson Blythe three months before Clinton was born, his step-father  Roger Clinton, and his mother Virginia Cassidy. In this mammoth book, he rushes through his childhood, and focuses on two historical years, 1963 and 1968, that shaped his early life: the assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963; and the 1963 ‘I Have a Dream Speech’ by Martin Luther King Jr. and his assassination in 1968. Major events in Waco, Bosnia, and Somalia, for example, shaped his presidency.   Detailed in listing almost everyone he has ever met, Clinton again rushes through his courtship and marriage to Hillary Rodham in 1975 and the birth of daughter Chelsea in 1980.   He focuses on his work life, political hustings and campaigning, converations with colleagues on both sides of the fence, in...