- Dr Paul Kelly, Editor-at-Large, The Australian

Liberal Party founder and long-serving prime minister Robert (Bob) Menzies along with Labor foreign minister and attorney-general Bert (the Doc) Evatt were two of the biggest names in 20th century Australian politics. The former led his party to election victories, the latter to defeats. Menzies and Evatt were born in 1894. Both men, from relatively modest backgrounds, were brilliant students who starred at law before entering the Commonwealth Parliament.

From the early 1940s to the early 1960s, they took different sides on such issues as bank nationalisation, the attempt to ban the Communist Party and the Petrov affair - ideological disagreements which co-existed with mutual distrust and personal rivalries.

Anne Henderson was educated at Melbourne University and is deputy director of The Sydney Institute - a forum for debate and discussion which enjoys good relations with both sides of Australian politics. She is the editor of The Sydney Papers Online and one of Australia's leading biographers with studies on Dame Enid Lyons and former prime minister Joseph Lyons along with books on immigration and women in politics. Anne Henderson's Menzies at War was short-listed for the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History in 2015 and she appeared in the ABC TV documentary Howard on Menzies: Building Modern Australia (2016) and Foxtel's The Menzies Years hosted by John Howard (2022)