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George Brandis is all loved up about literature. He self-describes as “Minister for Books”; he values his humble arts degree over his law colours; he was impressively unapologetic about his A$13,100 splurge of public money on a professional library and his A$7,000 spend on a splendid set of bookshelves – not to mention showing bald-faced stoicism when ribbed for reading bush ballads in Senate Estimates.
What’s more, Brandis’ taste in political writing is impressively even handed: JS Mill is there as a libertarian backbone – Brandis did an undergraduate honours thesis on Mill – and so are John Howard and Dick Cheney from the right, but then there is Robert Caro on Lyndon Johnson and David Marr on Tony Abbott on the left.
