It is a volume of enormous value, not because it tells the full story of the great prime minister within its pages, but because Bunting confined himself to those matters about which virtually only he could write with undisputed conviction and authority.The heart of the book is a searching essay about the recent evolution of cabinet and ministerial government in Australia. His cabinet minutes, elegant and lucid, remain unsurpassed.In retirement he chaired the Official Establishments Trust, which oversees the residences of the Governor-General and the Prime Minister, and was National Co-Ordinator of the Sir Robert Menzies Memorial Trust.The self-effacing habits of an official lifetime hardly died but in Bunting’s case they fortunately relaxed sufficiently for him to compose R.G Menzies – a Portrait (1988). His academic prowess was matched by comparable talent on the sporting field where he excelled in cricket, Australian Rules football, tennis and, in later life, golf.His first decade in the public service was spent in the departments of Trade & Customs and Post-War Reconstruction. But in 1950, with the latter’s abolition, he went to the Prime Minister’s Department and found his metier in serving and developing the Cabinet system on a professional, civil service, departmental basis.

The high commissionership ended prematurely with serious heart illness. He returned to Australia early in 1977 and retired shortly afterwards.The son of a storekeeper, Bunting was born and grew up in rural districts of Victoria. He completed matriculation at Trinity College under Frank Shann, a notable headmaster who had, in a previous generation, taught Menzies himself.He read economics at the University of Melbourne, taking honours in a class which included Sir Bruce Williams, later Professor of Economics at Victoria University, Manchester. Until the early 1970s Australia’s relations with the UK had been a direct responsibility of the prime minister and his department: in the 1950s Bunting had served a term as Official Secretary in Australia House. Yet it was his removal from the post of civil service head of the Prime Minister’s Department in 1968 by the newly chosen Liberal prime minister John Gorton (succeeding the recently drowned Harold Holt) which heralded a marked shift in relations between minister and officials away from the close, though not always harmonious, alliance forged during the Second World War and fostered by succeeding Labour and Liberal-Country Party governments.
Though Bunting kept the prize post of Cabinet Secretary, his treatment by Gorton permanently soured the new prime minister’s relations with the civil service, not because of the deed but because of what was seen as, in the words of a commentator at the time, the “brutal and needlessly humiliating manner” in which it was done.When William McMahon displaced Gorton as Prime Minister in 1971, in a party-room vote, Bunting was recalled to head what has since been known as the Department of the Prime Minister & Cabinet (PM&C).Bunting’s period at the helm of PM&C saw the demise of the 23-year-old Liberal-Country Party coalition government and the first two frantic years of the three-year Labour government under Gough Whitlam which succeeded it.His return to London as High Commissioner was the culmination of a long and increasingly intimate association with the United Kingdom. He was discreet, anonymous and, above all, scrupulously impartial in relation to party politics.

Sir Robert Menzies, whom he served throughout his long post- war prime ministership (1949-66), described him as “the prince of public servants”. John Bunting, Secretary to the Australian Cabinet from 1959 to 1975 and Australian High Commissioner in London from 1975 to 1977, was the epitome of a civil servant in the Westminster mould. Here is my version of Asa Al-Ama’s “Rain on the River”:The hand of winds is workinglike a fine silversmith’s upon the river,pleating it into a thousand ripples.And always when it has finished forgingthe links of its chain-mail, the rain arrivesand rivets them with pins.James KirkupEmilio Garca Gomez, writer and diplomat: born Madrid 4 June 1905; died Madrid 31 May 1995.. His loss will be mourned not only in the fieldof literature but also that of diplomacy, for he was Spanish ambassador in Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey.A selection of my own translations of Emilio Garca Gomez’s versions of Arabo- Andalusian poems from the ninth to the 13th centuries appears in the current number of Modern Poetry in Translation (King’s College London). He had expressed a wish to be buried in the cemetery of San Jose in Granada, where he lay in state in the Escuela de Estudios Arabes. Garca Gomez’s other works included Cinco poetas musumanes (1944) and his magisterial volume of Ibn Hazm’s El collar de la paloma (1953).

He wrote studies of technical aspects of Arabic poetry, as in Las jarchas mozrabes y los judios de al-Andalus (1957) and Las jarchas romances de la serie rabe (1966).Though he died in Madrid, Garca Gomez considered himself not a Madrileno but a man of Andalusia. He especially loved Granada and the Alhambra, the subjects of works like Foco de antigua luz sobre la Alhambra and Poemas rabes en los muros y fuentes de la Alhambra. These refined, playful, delicately textured (and delicately translated) love lyrics had a seminal influence upon writers and poets like Lorca and Ortega y Gasset, and also on musicians like Manuel de Falla and Andres Segovia. A good selection of them was translated by Christopher Middleton and Leticia Garza-Falcn and appeared in the New Yorker, 5 September 1988, where they created an unforgettable impression.
Arabic was the official language of Spain for five centuries, and its literary and architectural heritage is everywhere evident today in Spain. He was a student of the great scholar of Arabic literature Miguel Asn y Palacios (1871-1944), to whom he dedicated one of his best-known collections in 1930, Poemas Arabigoandaluces, still a best-seller.

One of the last surviving links with the literary life of Spain in the Twenties, Emilio Garca Gomez was a scholar and a translator who specialised in Hispano-Arabic poetry. He also assisted many other charities, including the Leeds General Infirmary Lifescan Appeal.Ronald Anthony Clegg, businessman: born 8 April 1937; manager, Mountain Mills Co 1961-63, director 1963-66; director, Mountleigh 1966-72, joint managing director 1972-83, chairman and chief executive 1983-89; chairman, E & F Securities 1978-95; chairman, United Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust 1990-95; deputy chairman and trustee, Prince’s Youth Business Trust 1990-95; married 1963 Dorothy Glaze (three daughters); died York 1 June 1995.. Under his leadership the trust pressed ahead in many areas, completing a pounds 10.7m renewal of Chapel Allerton Hospital in record time and starting work on a pounds 80m wing at Leeds General Infirmary.Clegg took public service extremely seriously and made efforts to visit all areas of the hospital including the pathology laboratories where research funded through Cansearch was undertaken. After his initial involvement Clegg kept in close touch with the society, which elected him its first non- medical honorary member in 1993.His election as the first chairman of the United Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust in April 1990, one of the first wave of trusts established following the health service reorganisation. We told him that there were marked deficiencies in training and as a result he personally provided funds to “pump prime” a cytology training school in Leeds and offered to raise money through business colleagues to provide funds to establish a charity for research, training and the purchase of new equipment.Thus, “Cansearch” was born, a charity which has distributed nearly pounds 1m to pathology research groups in Leeds, Nottingham, and the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, among many others.