Allan Martin's magisterial two-volume biography, it might have been thought, said it all. But biographies continue to appear, just in case Professor Martin missed a trick or two. In 2021, Melbourne University opened the Robert Menzies Institute as a prime ministerial library and museum to go along with so many other buildings and activities across the country named in his honour. If you can't get to 20 of them, you're not really trying.

This book, published by the eponymous institute, is the first of four proposed volumes, just for starters; I suspect the man himself would have been horrified. He was, essentially, quite modest and very private, self-deprecating even, certainly not given to big-noting. I never met him myself, but I've known or studied several people who knew him well. He was prime minister for the first 21 years of my life on this planet.

Dame Beryl Beaurepaire knew him well; her parents and the Menzies family shared a back fence. As Beaurepaire rose in his Liberal Party of Australia, Menzies was supportive and delighted. He gave equal voice to women in his party in those far-off days. When he was unwell, and in Melbourne's Mercy Hospital, Beaurepaire, visiting, took along a bottle of single malt scotch. "Take it home, Beryl dear," he instructed, "scotch now tastes to me like sucking blankets."

Readers will not find such anecdotes in this book. The tone here is worthy and reverential, even adulatory. There are 11 contributors, and here is a major whinge. Most edited books of contributory chapters contain a list of contributors and their backgrounds so that readers may judge their singular experience and skills. Not here. Apart from a few, I have no idea who these writers are. Black mark, MUP.

The collection attempts to explain the young Menzies and his dizzying rise to prominence. A talented and gifted student, extremely hard-working and driven, six weeks into his career in the Victorian parliament and already a minister, two months into his career in the federal Parliament and again a minister - remarkable!

Son of a Jeparit shop-keeper and later parliamentarian, grandson of two parliamentarians, nephew of another, politics was in his blood. A supremely gifted barrister, who was appointed King's Counsel at 34, the youngest Australian to be so appointed. The law was Menzies' great love. Public service, he said, was his duty.

Jeparit, in Victoria's Mallee, boasted a Mechanics Institute, as did many country towns in pre-federation Victoria, and young Robert was a reader. Not deterred that the institute only boasted a couple of hundred books initially; readers may get the impression that young Robert read them all.

But, on scholarships, Robert went first to a private school in Ballarat and then to Melbourne's prestigious Wesley College and then Melbourne University. An average student at Wesley, he thrived at University. Readers may wish this book told us a bit about the young man, his friends, his adventures, his dreams. But it is work that dominates. Those from relatively humble backgrounds, still, will understand that. Study and excel - that way lies liberation.

The two stand-out contributors in this collection are also two of Australia's most highly regarded academics, Judith Brett and Frank Bongiorno. For clarity of writing, intelligence and span they put lesser-known contributors in the shade. Bongiorno and the relationship between Menzies and Curtin is insightful, fascinating and moving. Brett on Alfred Deakin and Menzies is simply enthralling.

An elder of the Australian historical tribe, Geoffrey Blainey, points out in his foreword there is an element of repetition in some of these chapters, some writers even using the same quotes. Editor, what were you thinking?

Yet this is an important book. Readers may be surprised to learn that Menzies was resolutely anti-sectarian from a young age, believing his parents and others in his extended family to be shocking bigots.

Speaking to the founding conference of the Liberal Party in Albury in 1944, Menzies told delegates there was no room in Australia for a party of reaction or negation. "We are determined to be a progressive party," he told them, "willing to make experiments."

Menzies retired from the prime ministership in 1966, so would be unknown to many of this book's intended readership. If it serves to help readers understand what the party was meant to be, it may be a useful instrument in modern Australian politics.