– to feel the delicious bewilderment of being alive on a planet surrounded by unimaginable infinite space and unimaginable time; to experience once again the angst of living with an imperfect intelligence, and incomplete knowledge, and a consciousness prone to all weathers of the soul, and which is unable to answer the fundamental adolescent questions of our children about why we are here, why we exist; to laugh at the dangerous, nonsensical, religious narratives we concoct to handle all this; and the nature of inescapable death. Or you may not, as the case may be. Reception and Appreciation In a review in the South China Morning Post in 2006, Alister McMillan notes Moorhouse, 67, hasn't told all in his memoir. Nor has he added to the self-help shelf with an etiquette guide. Martini records the history and cultural baggage of the cocktail he describes as 'one of the great narratives of modern folklore', and it candidly explores the appearance of the cocktail in his life and writing. But the autobiography and the drink are only the botanicals of this book. Martini is about connoisseurship. Observations on taste, manners and the full life are rife in Moorhouse's most acclaimed novels, Grand Days and Dark Palace, which both revolve around Edith Campbell Berry, a woman from a small Australian town who becomes cosmopolitan in manners, learning and sex while working for the League of Nations in Geneva. Catharine Lumby, Moorhouse's biographer, opened her obituary for Moorhouse with a reference to the book: Frank Moorhouse structured his 2005 semi-fictional memoir Martini around his favourite drink. He was fascinated by the rituals and rules for living well that the martini symbolised. In Martini, he satirises the ritualism of the drink in a joke titled The Martini Rescue. If you get lost in the bush, he writes, "You do not panic. You do not walk aimlessly. You find a shady spot with a fine view, you sit down, you take out the cocktail shaker, the gin, the vermouth, and the olives from your backpack (which every sophisticated trekker carries) and mix yourself a martini." Within a few minutes someone will appear and say: "That is not the proper way to make a martini." The question of how many rules we need to live well and in a civilised manner fascinated Moorhouse, and it’s a theme that structures much of his work, culminating in his magnum