The Hyde revival in modern scholarship, if I can call it that, was given a boost in 1991 by the publication of Disputed Ground – Robin Hyde, Journalist, by Victoria University Press.
The reputation of Lawlor and the predominantly male types of his generation received a boost just this year with Chris Hilliard's comprehensive study, The Bookmen's Dominion.
Hilliard's narrative analysis has been honed by writing he has done on the psychology of salvage and what he calls textual museums, and the important part played by the bookmen's contribution in the development of the humanities in New Zealand.
This kind of analysis coupled with the large number of evocative photos in The Bookmen's Dominion, goes a long way to capturing and reconstructing the reality of who could be counted as New Zealand scholars and writers, particular to that era when (Pakeha) newspapermen took a consciously active role as the nation's cultural middle men and recorders of history.
(The Bookmen's Dominion also contains the factual material mined and converted by Maurice Gee for his 2003 novel, The Scornful Moon, in which Pat Lawlor is reanimated and recast as the moralistic journalist Sam Holloway).
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