There is a timeless quality about some Australian authors that causes one to applaud when discerning publishers revive their work for new generations of readers. Wakefield Press’s reissue of Alan Moorehead’s The Villa Diana, first published in 1951, presents this fecund author’s book of essays, now subtitled ‘Travels in Post-war Italy’ ($24.95 pb, 224 pp, 9781862548459). It provides a neat introduction to Moorehead’s famous camera-like eye and his beguiling prose, which, as one commentator put it, offers ‘a long conversation that you wish would never end’.

Moorehead (1910–83) had already been anointed ‘the Prince of War Correspondents’ for his compelling reporting of World War II’s North African and European campaigns for The Daily Express, and was celebrated for his African Trilogy (1944) and Eclipse (1945), when he turned his back on journalism and the importunate Lord Beaverbrook, and moved in 1948 with his family to Tuscany. They lived in a rambling fifteenth-century villa outside Florence, near Fiesole. Here, the Australian expatriate, with his English polish, hoped to shape his dream of becoming a Renaissance man, or at least a ‘Mediterranean man’, refreshed by the arts and history of the high Renaissance.