Looking for Leadership. I approached this with some foreboding – ‘Leadership’ is one of those words that has me feeling for the safety catch, especially after Paul Keating adopted it as the slogan for his doomed 1996 election campaign (I was especially irked by the superfluous full stop in banners reading “Leadership.”). And while I’ve very much liked a lot of Horne’s work, elder statesmen can start to take themselves too seriously.

But my fears were ill-founded. This is an excellent book, thoughtful and, while very critical of Howard, not a diatribe against him. I particularly liked a point Horne stresses, that the Commonwealth of Australia is unique in the way it was created by a popular vote (corrections welcome -put them in the comments thread). It’s not a bloodstained national myth of the kind that was considered appropriate in the 19th and 20th centuries, and was therefore overshowed by the Anzac legend, but it’s just right for the world of the 21st century and to the ideas of social democratic internationalism (my alternative to the pejorative “Transnational Progressivism‘) .

I’m also reading The Tie That Binds by Kent Haruf. It’s a family tragedy set in the high plains of Colorado. The blurb makes comparisons to Cormac McCarthy and Alice Munro, which seems about right. I sometimes find McCarthy a bit portentous, but Haruf’s prose is simple and unpretentious. Another obvious comparison is to Willa Cather, whom I haven’t read for years, but should dig out again.