Peter Heerey

Tom Hughes QC: A cab on the rank by Ian Hancock

August 2016, no. 383

The subtitle of this compellingly readable biography of Thomas Eyre Forrest Hughes AO QC borrows the underlying philosophical metaphor of the independent Bar ...

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The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History by Boris Johnson

by Peter Heerey •

December 2015, no. 377

Peter Heerey reviews 'The Churchill Factor' by Boris Johnson

Had it not been for the leadership of Winston Churchill in 1940, Nazi Germany would in all probability have won World War II. The most enthusiastic revisionist historian would grudgingly accept this proposition.

As this highly readable account by London Mayor Boris Johnson shows, 1940 was the high point of a career that extended from the 1890s to the 1960s. ...

Old Law, New Law: A Second Australian Legal Miscellany by Keith Mason

by Peter Heerey •

August 2015, no. 373

Peter Heerey reviews 'Old Law, New Law' by Keith Mason

The practice of the law is about stories. The stories the parties tell to the judge, the story the judge tells back or, if you like, the judge’s review of the parties’ stories. Along the way there can be much that is frankly boring to onlookers, or indeed the parties themselves, but also drama, pathos, and humour, both intentional and the opposite. And past case ...

Excursions in the Law by Peter Heerey

by Colin Golvan •

December 2014, no. 367

Colin Golvan reviews 'Excursions in the Law' by Peter Heerey

What’s on a judge’s mind? Litigants and advocates would love to know. Former judge Peter Heerey answers that question in his latest book, a compendium of writing over many years, covering a vast array of topics and in myriad forms.

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An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris

by Peter Heerey •

June–July 2014, no. 362

Some of the wildly successful historical novels of Richard Harris are counter-factual, like Fatherland (1992), which assumes a successful Nazi invasion of Britain. By contrast, his most recent work, An Officer and a Spy (2013), builds on a highly detailed account of the Dreyfus affair, which convulsed France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ...

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The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro

by Peter Heerey •

November 2012, no. 346

Peter Heerey reviews 'The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The passage of power' by Robert A. Caro

In Australia today, Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73) seems a fleeting figure on history’s stage: a brief interlude between Kennedy’s Camelot and Nixon’s Watergate – ‘All the way with LBJ!’ – the retreat from quagmire Vietnam – and that’s about it. So how does one justify buying and reading Robert A. Caro’s seven hundred-page book (dubbed ‘bloated’ by one critic), the fourth in a five-volume biography?

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