As an historian I cannot write without first checking out all available sources that I can lay my hands on. These include archival sources, sometimes in manuscript. It is no easy task sorting everything out and trying to make sense of it. But then you have to contextualize, structure and dissect it and to convey meaning to a reader, and to let the facts speak for themselves as far as possible, to carry the reader with you from start to finish. Secondary sources are also indispensable because they contain much accumulated wisdom and findings of relevance. To credit other authors wherever appropriate is an enrichment. This deserves emphasis as in Malta particularly, you will find plagiarists or one-upmanship attempts, usually but not only among amateurs. I often end up revising again and again as I am never 100 per cent sure of anything, although once documentary sources are placed in a proper perspective these are usually reliable. It is also important to try and give space to varied even conflicting opinions, which is usually the case, especially but not only when writing about culture clash or political interests, national or international. In the case of Malta, since 1986 I have been working on Italian as well as British archival materials, as well as the Maltese ones and to a certain extent American ones too, mainly on the inter-war period. This is vital as we have been much too subjected to a British and even colonial interpretation of events. Identifying persons and possible motives is also a great challenge. Many of my articles, since the late 1980s when I gravitated back to academia in Melbourne, have been published overseas so even local university students are often not aware of them at all and frequently do not refer to them in their theses. Since my first book about the Sette Giugno in 1970 I have always tried to include different shades of opinion and operative forces in analysing events and personalities, thus for example, for the first time in my 1969 Hajja articles, which then constituted the gist of the Sette Giuigno study, I mentioned the Dimechian element, although there was a difference of opinion as to how much that was actually in action - Gino Muscat Azzopardi told me no, Karmenu Zammit told me yes; and so on. Dimech was still very much a taboo in those days, very risky. In post-war Malta nobody had raised this subject, which schoolchildren knew nothing about at that time. I feel that having been a working journalist in Malta and in Switzerland has helped me write in a run-on, readily intelligible style, even when I am dealing with difficult topics. One of the best compliments came from a friend who told me she had read Party Politics in a Fortress Colony on the beach: “I read it like a novel.” Well, I don’t write novels. Party Politics… is a heavily documented work, now in its third edition; but if a reader can be sufficiently stimulated, imaginatively, to pick up the threads and follow them to advantage that is the most an author can hope for really.

Both The Origins of Maltese Statehood and my Censu Tabone biography have gone into second editions and are almost sold out. My most recent work has been an exercise in translation, adaptation and updating:

Colonialismo e nazionalismo nel Mediterraneo: la lotta partitica maltese durante l’occupazione inglese; tra assimilazione e resistenza (Urbino, 2009). I believe this is the first such work on Malta ever to be published in Italian; it is also my first book published in Italy.

The KKM bookshop in Strada Stretta will be having a limited number of copies of it. Editing and coordination of text is another aspect of writing, such was Malta: Culture and Identity, co-edited with Oliver Friggieri, in 1994. Much more importantly, such too will be my forthcoming two volumes on The European Mind due to appear from the Malta University Press later this year, for which several orders have already been placed especially from the USA. Of course in Malta very few persons will acquire or read it, although there might be a newspaper, perhaps this one, even interested in reviewing it or a bookshop interested in selling it. Another forthcoming study based on Australian sources entitled Australian Press Perspectives of Lord Strickland’s Malta will appear in September in the forthcoming edition of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, to which our university library does not even subscribe probably due to lack of funds. I remember Vanni Bonello’s chagrin when in reviewing my article in a Sunday paper then well-known for its book reviews - on Britain’s European Mediterranean: Language, Religion and Politics in Lord Strickland’s Malta 1927-1930, in History of European Ideas - he had lamented the fact that works of such calibre tended to remain completely unknown on the island. It is for this reason that Midsea will be publishing an anthology of them hopefully in time for the next Book Fair. There is little point in writing anything that does not have a readership, which can transcend any editorial agenda or limitations. But how many of your readers would know about the latest edition of the Journal of Mediterranean Studies, which also includes my article from Tunisian sources on Maltese migrant settlers in North Africa in the late 1930s? I don’t think I have even seen it reviewed anywhere.