Sydney, as everybody knows, is Australia’s world city, always has been. It offers the urban metonym – Opera House sails – which, together with Uluru, is Australia to the outside world. And it generates, or generated, a particular kind of intellectual, the Sydney larrikin, rogue male. These books claim to cover two such, Bobs Hughes and Ellis. How might we receive them?

The visuals for these books are clever, optical metonyms in themselves. Gaudy retro colours hold synoptic images – Hughes’s eyes and brows; Ellis’s gut, dangling spectacles and crumpled tie. That’s about all the two books have in common, for they are less the ‘Brief Lives’ they claim to be than essays, a contemplative memoir on the part of Andrew Riemer, a political backhander from Michael Warby.