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Migrant writing in this country isn’t just burgeoning, it has begun to flourish. The writing itself and the study of it begin to look like a ‘growth industry’. What I know of it is varied both in kind and quality, but I’ve no doubt at all that the poetry of Dimitris Tsaloumas is an important achievement by any standard.

This is such a good book, written in the best military fashion, with all points assembled in proper order but written with the wit and irony usually missing from military historians, that it is a pity it is not better designed. The title page really lacks finesse. But the illustrations and notes are very well-chosen and easy on the eye. It deals equally with civilian surveillance as with military surveillance over, and the reduction of, the rights of others.

When I was in London working on a book that Nicholas Whitlam and I wrote on the Petrov Affair, I became friendly with Dr Michael Bialagouski. Bialagouski and I went out several times with our wives to places selected by Michael; a gambling club that had once been run by George Raft, a Chinese restaurant that had a reputation in intelligence circles, that sort of thing.

This sixth work of fiction by Frank Moorhouse consists of four groups of related stories. The first and by far the best group, ‘Pacific City’, contains six stories centred around the figure of Irving Bow, proprietor of a cinema located near an unbuilt town named Pacific City during the late nineteen-twenties (not the nineteen-thirties as the back cover claims).