From the editor

THIS Friday, November 6, marks 10 years since the no vote prevailed in the referendum that asked whether Australia should become a republic.

THIS Friday, November 6, marks 10 years since the no vote prevailed in the referendum that asked whether Australia should become a republic.

It's worth recalling what Malcolm Turnbull, then a cast-iron republican, said of John Howard at the time: "Whatever else he achieves, history will remember him for only one thing. He was the prime minister who broke a nation's heart. He was the man who made Australia keep a foreign queen." A decade on, Turnbull could use some of the wile that saw Howard win that battle and many others. But did the referendum result really break our collective heart? Hardly, suggests Nick Bryant, the BBC's man in Sydney, in this month's cover story, The Slow Death of British Australia. As the photographs on our cover illustrate, while much can change in 10 years, much can stay the same, too.

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PUBLISHING is blessed with inventive PR people, but the team at Pan Macmillan has excelled itself with Bart Cummings's autobiography. A week before the book was released it orchestrated a Caulfield Cup quinella for the 81-year-old racehorse trainer. The next week, it was the Cox Plate, and no one will have been surprised if a 13th Melbourne Cup was added to the sideboard yesterday (the ALR went to print in late October). Bart: My Life ($49.99, HB), which Cummings wrote with author Malcolm Knox, is a spritely read, and here's a sure bet: when it comes to James Bartholomew Cummings and big races, the final chapter is yet to be written.

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THE irrepressible Clive James has two new books out, an essay collection, The Revolt of the Pendulum, and the latest instalment of his unreliable memoirs, The Blaze of Obscurity, both from Picador. In the introduction to the former, James tosses this bouquet: "The ALR, in its latest form, has at last been given the editorial resources befitting its status as a supplement to the country's leading newspaper. Rupert Murdoch will be able to brandish a copy of it when he arrives at the pearly gates and St Peter asks him whether he really thinks his proprietorship of the News of the World qualifies him for entry." Lest I be accused of immoderate tooting of my own horn, I'll add that James praises The Monthly, too.

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PENGUIN has just released a perky little title, Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books Retold through Twitter ($16.95). For the uninitiated, Twitter is a micro-blogging platform in which posts, known as tweets, are restricted to 140 characters. Here's an amusing two-tweet snippet from Macbeth: Hah! Macduff thinks he can kill me!

Shit. C-Section is "not of woman born"? What kind of king dies on a goddamn technicality?

Just fun or the end of civilisation? Have your say on this and more on the ALR blog, A Pair of Ragged Claws.