Chris Masters on books that have influenced him
The Home Girls by Olga Masters, who is my mother. She’s been a big influence on my life. A journalist of course, a mostly provincial suburban journalist, but who has such great capability and taught me a huge amount. This is the only book on my list that is fiction, but it’s got to be there because there’s no other person in my life that has more influence, personal and professional. There are some lovely stories in The Home Girls. Mum had seven kids and she waited until the final one got off her hands, settled onto a typewriter and wrote a bunch of books that ended up being sold around the world, translated in French, Italian and Russian and so on.
Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves. Obviously war and war history is of particular interest to me, and this is an amazing book. It’s not all about the war, but he was a veteran of the Great War, and it’s noteworthy for its stunning candour. He says he wrote when he ceased to care what anyone thought of him. That resonated with me.
Edward R Murrow: American Original by Joseph E Persico. I’m choosing this because of the subject. Ed Murrow is probably the best journalist I can think of in the past 100 years. He’s interesting because he was a pioneer reporter in television. He famously took on Joseph McCarthy, so I’m a great admirer.
The Struggle for Europe by Chester Wilmot. Wilmot was from the same generation as Murrow and he’d covered World War 2. He was an ABC reporter, and ended up becoming noteworthy in the European theatre, essentially because he got kicked out of Australia by the Commander-in-chief, General Thomas Blamey. Wilmot had been the accredited correspondent covering the Australian Imperial Force in the Middle East, and he’d lost his accreditation because he’d clashed with Blamey. I admire that. I admire the kind of courage where you stand up for truth against power. So he went off to Europe, and wrote this wellrecognised tome about WWII after the war, but was killed in a plane accident on the way home.
Jeffrey Archer: Stranger Than Fiction by Michael Crick. This was influential because I did an unauthorised biography called Jonestown about radio personality Alan Jones. I won’t say I was inspired by Crick, but I was encouraged when I read Crick’s unauthorised biography of the author. I loved Crick’s book, and on the cover he’s got this little quote by Archer, “I hate this book,” so that was great promotion for it.