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Sunday, January 31, 2010

Pistols! Treason! Murder!: Judges' Comments for the 2008 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards

The following is not very topical, but I'm posting it here as a form of indexing. In 2008, the Australian edition of Pistols! Treason! Murder! was shortlisted for The Prize for a First Book of History in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. Below is the judges' report:

Pistols! Treason! Murder!
Jonathan Walker
(Melbourne University Publishing)

This deeply satisfying book takes readers into the world of seventeenth-century Venetian master spy, Gerolamo Vano. In the process, Jonathan Walker reveals how he creatively made history, out of a newly discovered and fragmentary archive in the form of Vano’s surveillance reports. Closely reading these documents, Walker constructs a spell-binding tale of people and place, in a book that reflects on the practice of history-making and poses large questions about the compact between historians and their readers, and what counts as a trustworthy version of a past.

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