Paul Keating: the biography. David Day. 2015.

Leaving school at fourteen, Paul Keating was not expected to do well. Yet he was elected to parliament at the age of just twenty-five and went on to become one of Australia’s most important political figures.

Prize-winning biographer David Day has written an extraordinary story of the single-minded ambition that drove Keating to the top, with him becoming a devastating debater in parliament and eventually toppling Australia’snmost popular prime minister, Bob Hawke.

By then, Keating had been treasurer for nearly nine years, during which time he had transformed the Australian economy, making it much more open and outward looking and setting it up for the prosperity of the late 1990s.

But it was the position of prime minister that Keating particularly coveted. Only then would he get the chance to make the really big changes to Australia and to the ways that Australians thought of themselves and their place in the world.