These pen portraits of the outstanding personalities on the New Zealand political stage from before the First Worlds War to the second, have an immediacy and a vividness. This is partly due to the author’s habit of writing letters home every day – recounting events, stories and conversations that struck him as noteworthy, and partly because they were his friends, his colleagues, and his opponents.
These portraits are warm, vital, challenging, often ribaldly amusing ( there are more real belly-laughs in this book than in anything else he has written). John A Lee lived in, and through tempestuous days; he writes whit vigour.
Old issues, fiercely contested in their day, tend to be forgotten. John A Lee makes them live again. As he says “the Wet/Dry-Catholic/Protestant period had to be lived through to be believed”.