James Mcneish - Dance of the Peacocks: New Zealanders in Exile in the Time of Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung

Altogether they knew five wars, three revolutions and - in the case of Ian Milner, accused in the Cold War of being a spy - a slander. This is a fascinating story based on letters, diaries and interviews in several countries. It is the story of a group of Rhodes scholars, five young men - James Bertram, Geoffrey Cox, Dan Davin, Ian Milner, John Mulgan - caught up in the turmoil of their times: Spain, Hitlers Germany, Greece and North Africa, Eastern Europe, China. They left New Zealand in the thirties for the dreaming spires of Oxford. War intervened. Only one returned.

From reviews of The Dance of the Peacocks:

Not one Colossus of Rhodes, but five of them, and the brilliance of this work by James McNeish is to weave their stories into one compellingly readable tale. They were all New Zealanders; they were all Rhodes scholars, bar one. They were writers and soldiers and diplomats and adventurers. They were the cream of their generation, pathfinders, cultural explorers who went where few Kiwis had been before

This is a work of scholarship equal to the academic virtues it unashamedly celebrates. There are signposts aplenty here on the road map to a fledgling cultural identity. But it is also a rattling good yarn which amply underlines the gifted and underrated literary talents of the author.

Simon Cunliffe in The Press

Dance of the Peacocks is the work where all of McNeishs gifts come together. The novelist, the biographer and the political journalist combine in this account of five New Zealanders who went to Oxford in the 1930s and became embroiled in the international political maelstrom of those times

In both general concept and concrete avocation, in pattern and in detail, this is a remarkable book.

Lawrence Jones in Dominion Post

Such is McNeishs skill that the book hangs together with, yes, the shape of a novel and the grip of a thriller.

McNeish has walked a lone trail in New Zealand writing for 45 years. The young journalist who did six years on the New Zealand Herald in the 50s before becoming a fulltime writer in 1964 has travelled widely, carrying out what you might call a McNeish market of his own, while remaining, as Iain Sharp remarks, private, elusive, inviolable.

Denis Welch in NZ Listener

Dance of the Peacocks is one of the most richly fascinating New Zealand non-fiction books for many years.

Iain Sharp in Sunday Star-Times

McNeish writes that these are not biographies in any form or sense. With only 400 pages that is hardly surprising, and not really an appropriate measure of the books success. What does matter is that, through these stories, he succeeds in repatriating for us something of what was exported, and thought lost.

Felicity Barnes in New Zealand Herald

for

HELEN

whose idea this book was