Over the past few years, Bob Carr has been tweaking the veils that shroud his inner self. In essays, speeches and book reviews, he has teased and titillated us with glimpses of his diary and extracts from his unpublished autobiographical novel, Titanic Forces. Now, with Marilyn Dodkin’s Bob Carr: The Reluctant Leader, built around Carr’s personal diary, we have a grand disrobing. Although she has used Hansard reports, newspaper files and interviews, there would be no publishable work without the diary, quotations from which average two per page. Indeed Carr’s words constitute some thirty per cent of the book. The diary provides the work’s narrative structure, and, when the diarist flags, so does the book. A result of this approach is that the author’s rather pedestrian prose is often outshone by the diarist’s vivid and sardonic style.