'Alfred Deakin (1856-1919) was a pivotal figure in Australian political history. He was an architect of Federation and White Australia in 1901 and three times prime minister before he withdrew from public life in 1913. Judith Brett’s important biography, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin (2017), which won the 2018 National Biography Award, is only the third biography of Deakin, following those by Walter Murdoch (1923) and John La Nauze (1965). (Introduction)