With the publication of Eminent Victorians in 1918, Lytton Strachey famously created a new mode of biographical writing – spare, ironic, satiric, detached. In his preface to that slim cathartic volume of portraits of four famous Victorian personalities, Strachey extolled the biographer’s virtue of what he called ‘a becoming brevity’. That preface has been called a ‘manifesto of modern biography’. In his breaking of new ground, Strachey turned his back on the sombre and dutiful ‘lives’ that had become the accepted mode of biographical homage in Victorian England.

David Branagan’s affectionate and respectful life of T.W. Edgeworth David – the Welsh-born scientist, adventurer and soldier who became a colossus in his adopted Australia – is as deeply old-fashioned as it is celebratory. The Strachey dictum of brevity does not apply. In twenty-five chapters, Branagan’s labour of love follows the conventional trajectory of the cradle to the grave, but is best always on the public and professional aspects of an eminent pioneering career. At home, David’s family adored him and he was always generously supported by his able wife, Cara Mallett, who gave up a promising career of her own to marry him.