Peter Ryan (columnist)

Peter Allen Ryan MM (4 September 1923 – 13 December 2015) was a newspaper columnist, author, World War II spy, director of Melbourne University Press and an officer of the Victorian Supreme Court.

[1] He left school at 16 to work in the Victorian public service, but as soon as he turned 18 he enlisted in the army to fight in World War II.

He married in 1947, and worked as a freelance writer, then in advertising, then as Public Relations Manager with ICI in Melbourne.

In the September 1993 edition of Quadrant he wrote an attack on the six-volume History of Australia by Manning Clark, which Melbourne University Press had published between 1962 and 1987.

[6] Among other things he said Clark's history was "over a million printed English words, probably unrivalled in their power to combine the non sequitur with the anticlimax, and to wring the last drops from a series of foregone conclusions".