This, of course, is literary Archibald Prize and, just like the art competition that annually sets Sydney’s cognoscenti abuzz, it will provide grist for plenty of arguments. Which of these profiles catches a passably good likeness of its subject? In which are the brush-strokes boldest and most compelling?

Matthew Ricketson has written a rather woolly introduction, in which he variously traces the rise of biography as a literary form since Plutarch, the rise of the journalistic profile from the early days of The New Yorker, and the rise of the specifically Australian profile from John Hetherington’s pioneering book, Australians: Nine Profiles (1960). The untidiness of this introduction is mainly caused by Ricketson’s failure to explain what he means by a profile; and that failure is amplified by the idiosyncratic choices he has subsequently made in his selection.