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Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 Double Life
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‘Mark Colvin’s fine memoir – of a journalist’s life and as a spy’s son – was completed before the Macquarie Dictionary chose ‘fake news’ as its word of the year, and the OED and Merriam-Webster opted for ‘post truth’ and ‘surreal’. In July 2016, as Colvin was writing his acknowledgments chapter, Donald Trump was being nominated as the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States. Colvin does not mention Trump’s name. But his entire book – a principled insider’s history of the craft of journalism, of Cold War politics, espionage, and the pivotal political events of the twentieth and early twenty-first century – is a counter-instance to ‘fake news’ and the hyperventilating culture which spawns it. It is also a bracing reminder that the fourth estate – in its now myriad manifestations – remains the necessary counterweight to the abuse of power and to oligarchic or autocratic rule.’ (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Book Review ABR no. 389 March 2017 10824710 2017 periodical issue

    'Welcome to the March issue! Highlights include:

    • Ross McKibbin on the Chilcot Report into the Iraq debacle
    • Margaret Harris on an ‘enthralling’ study of Queen Victoria
    • Morag Fraser on Mark Colvin’s dual memoir
    • Beejay Silcox on George Saunders’s début novel
    • The 2017 Peter Porter Poetry Prize shortlist

    (From ABR website)

    2017
    pg. 29
Last amended 10 Mar 2017 13:05:41
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